A Computational Alembic for a Web of Knowledge

The current web is a web of linked pages. Frustrated users search for facts by guessing which keywords or keyword phrases might lead them to pages where they can find facts. Can people make it possible for users to search directly for facts? Can they turn the web into a web of facts (in addition to a web of pages containing facts)? Ultimately, can the web also be a knowledgebase - a WoK (Web of Knowledge) - that can provide direct answers to factual questions? The answer to these questions calls for distilling knowledge from the web's wealth of heterogeneous digital data.