Metaweb Technologies, Inc. was founded in 2005 as a spinoff of Applied Minds and was acquired by Google in 2010. Metaweb aims to create a better infrastructure for the web, allowing publishers to access content from various sources. Freebase, developed by Metaweb, is a community-curated database that captures and organizes information about people, places, and things in a structured manner. It functions like a database rather than a traditional article-based system like Wikipedia, making it readable by both humans and software. Freebase enables anyone to contribute, search, and use data, with the goal of building a semantic web.