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A description I gave someone in late 2015

• If you look at some physical object near you now, what you *know* 
  about it can be modeled with:
  - numbers (mass, size, shape, position, ...)
  - relationships (owner, maker, components, ingredients, manufacturing 
    process, maybe relative position...)
  - some attached code (maybe in a script attached to its class, say, a 
    class or scala-like trait of physical objects that says what happens when you 
    throw it, etc) ...but you don't have to be an engineer to know those things 
    (doesn't hurt, I realize). Hopefully one won't have to be an engineer to record 
    them in a structured enough way.
  
  Now imagine if all our knowledge were in such a system, not dependent 
  primarily on human language (such as, say historical knowledge, some 
  physics & chemistry, all kinds of familial or geographical 
  relationships etc etc), and imagine the kinds of queries we could 
  then run on such a system.