Metaweb Technologies, Inc. was a
San Francisco-based company that developed
Freebase, described as an "open, shared database of the world's knowledge". The company, founded by
Robert Cook and
Danny Hillis in 2005, was acquired by
Google in 2010. Although Metaweb no longer exists as a separate corporate entity, Freebase and its associated website
freebase.com]continue to be provided as an open database under Metaweb's original
CC-BY licensing terms. In December 2014, Google announced that it would be closing Freebase in 2015, transferring the data to
Wikidata.