Earlier this month, Russian search giant Yandex announced that it has provided a €150,000 grant to Wikidata, a non-profit organization that is developing a knowledge database with structured information obtained from Wikipedia articles.
Launched in October 2012 by Wikimedia Deutschland, Wikidata is creating a huge database about different objects, people, things, and phenomena, and how knowledge is connected and interrelated. The database can be edited by anyone and can be used by third-party websites.
For Yandex, Wikidata’s product provides a chance to train its ranking and machine learning system on a huge body of data, the company’s International Media Relations representative Vladimir Isaev said in an exchange with East-West Digital News, adding that well-structured information is very important for search engines.
In the past few years, Yandex has not been very active in providing grants and closing funding deals with startups, although it has a specially designated project for that called Yandex.Factory. Between 2010 and 2012, five startups attracted funding via the program: personal finance service Zenmoney; social shopping advisor SocialMart; mobile app prototyping tool Refine.io; SMB tools developer GBooking (formerly known as TimeBooker); and web-based collaborative text editor Citrea.
The grant for Wikidata is the first deal of this kind for Yandex this year. At present, the Yandex.Factory program is still in operation; Yandex, however, is “not too focused on investments now,” Isaev said, explaining that the company is more concerned at the moment with its new initiative, a 2-month bootcamp for startups christened Tolstoy Summer Camp, which will start on July 1st.
