A post in Micrsoft’s Bing blog, Understand Your World with Bing, announced that an update to their Satori knowledge base allows Bing to do a better job of identifying queries that mention a known entity, i.e., a person, place of organization. Bing’s use of Satori parallels the efforts of Google and Facebook in developing graph-based knowledge bases to move from “strings” to “things”.

Microsoft is using data from Satori to provide “snapshots” with data about an entity when it detects a likely mention of it in a query. This is very similar to how Google is using its Knowledge Graph KB.

One interesting thing that Satori is now doing is importing data from LinkedIn — data that neither Google’s Knowledge Graph nor Facebook’s Open Graph has. Another difference is that Satori uses RDF as its native model, or at least appears to, based on this description from 2012.

See recent posts in Techcrunch and Search Engine Land for more information.