By automatically extracting information from the Web, we can scale up the resulting knowledge bases to much greater sizes than current collections of manually gathered and user-contributed knowledge.

(Abstract)

A lot of work in this regard is being conducted at the University of Washington‘s Turing Center, led by Oren Etzioni. Some of that is also discussed in the article. Check out Machine Reading at Web Scale for a video of Etzioni’s presentation of some of their research.