Factual’s Gil Elbaz Wants to Gather the Data Universe
“Roman amphorae get dug up around Europe, and get described in all sorts of different ways, in different languages,” Mr. Bell says. “What we do here is the same kind of restoration. We started to learn it well when we had one million data sets uploaded. The early stuff was things like senators and how they voted, or ZIP codes, types of cigars, lists of video games. Merging ZIP codes is easy. Merging different ways people feel about toys is hard.”
Part of the difficulty, even among employees, is deciding how much data is enough. “For sure, we want the correct name and location of every gas station on the globe,” Mr. Bell says. “Not the price changes at every station.”
“Wait a minute, I’d like to know every gallon of gasoline that flows around the world,” Mr. Chklovski cuts in. “That might take us 20 years, but it would be interesting.”
At most start-ups, talk about doing the same kind of thing, only bigger and better, 20 years from now might seem like a marriage of the delusional and the dull. Mr. Elbaz and his team, however, say they feel that it makes sense. Telling everyone the true facts of the world is at least the work of a lifetime.
”Lately, I’ve been thinking that we need to get more personal data,” Mr. Elbaz says. He doesn’t mean names and addresses, but their genetic information, what they ate, when and where they exercised — ideally, for everyone on the planet, now and forever. “I want to figure out a way,” he says, “to get people to leave their data to science.”