A knowledge base (KB) contains a set of concepts, instances, and relationships. Over the past decade, numerous KBs have been built, and used to power a growing array of applications. Despite this flurry of activities, however, surprisingly little has been published about the end-to-end process of building, maintaining, and using such KBs in industry. In this paper we describe such a process. In particular, we describe how we build, update, and curate a large KB at Kosmix, a Bay Area startup, and later at WalmartLabs, a development and research lab of Walmart. We discuss how we use this KB to power a range of applications, including query understanding, Deep Web search, in-context advertising, event monitoring in social media, product search, social gifting, and social mining. Finally, we discuss how the KB team is organized, and the lessons learned. Our goal with this paper is to provide a real-world case study, and to contribute to the emerging direction of building, maintaining, and using knowledge bases for data management applications.

We investigate the problem of reliable multi-path provisioning of traffic in high-capacity optical backbone mesh networks, e.g., next-generation SONET/SDH networks supporting virtual concatenation (VCAT). VCAT enables a connection to be inversely multiplexed on to multiple paths. As a result, a connection can be provisioned more flexibly, and such a multi-path provisioning approach may lead to significantly improved performance over the conventional single-path provisioning approach. This multi-path provisioning approach may also be applicable to other mesh networks such as those employing optical wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) and multi-protocol label switching (MPLS), where the bandwidth of a connection to be provisioned exceeds the available capacity on any path based on current network state. We propose effective multi-path bandwidth as the metric to provision a connection on to multiple paths while satisfying its reliability requirements (measured in terms of availability). We show that effective multi-path bandwidth provides more flexibility and lower blocking probability without the cost and complexity associated with traditional protection schemes developed for optical WDM and MPLS networks.