Last week U.K.-based True Knowledge entered the next beta stage for its AI question-answering platform. The grand mission for True Knowledge is to use its semantic technology to build the first Internet-scale platform for directly answering the world’s questions.

It aims to be able to answer more questions as it understands more, thanks to pulling facts from Wikipedia, Freebase, and other online sources but also through the input of users who add people, businesses, or facts to its knowledge base. New in this beta, in fact, is the ability for users to contribute unstructured, or non-semantic, answers.

Among the other improvements in this update is the display of semantically-appropriate images. Ask it who was the 18th president of the U.S. was and there’s the name Ulysses S. Grant, and his image in a post-Civil War pose. True Knowledge also says that it provides longer-text answers that “build on our semantic technology and extend the answers we previously used to give,” according to the press release announcing the arrival of the latest beta.

True Knowledge got going a couple of years ago, and today its internal ontology is a couple of dozen-thousand classes strong. It reports it is answering questions based on more than 246 million facts (as of this writing) on 8, 129,159 things. That covers everything from A Christmas Carol to M.C. Escher to Zaire. This is truly fun stuff to play with from the consumer perspective, even with a still very noticeable degree of gaps in answers. The site also offers a Search Enhancer toolbar that users can download to add intelligence to Google and Bing search restuls.

But what’s perhaps most intriguing is that True Knowledge appears to be setting up its platform as a springboard for business growth. It is creating partnerships around its APIs, delivered last spring, which lets other purveyors’ applications take advantage of the knowledge and reasoning powers of its platform. True Knowledge explains that its API gives two different modes of interaction: the slower but simpler-to-use Direct Answer mode, where you query in natural language and get the answer back, as a list for instance, and The True Knowledge Query mode, where you use its internal query language to get the answers you want.

As other players sign on, that’s step-by-step expansion of the semantic web – not to mention of True Knowledge’s own business model.

Among True Knowledge’s API partnerships and uses so far are:

● Siri uses True Knowledge’s API in its Virtual Personal Assistant for the iPhone to help in understanding and providing answers to questions in natural language.

● Omgili, which has integrated True Knowledge results into its Google@Omgili service. Users of this service get a combination of knowledge-based responses powered by True Knowledge and Google search results and then directs searchers to discussions surrounding the links it surfaces. That further expands the social connections inherent in TrueKnowledge through its community-powered answers, so now users can find more in-depth discussions on topics they’re interested in, and potential soulmates with similar interests.

● You can even query True Knowledge information from inside Second Life. In December one user created Knowledge Bit, a Second Life “personal assistant” device that opens a chat window where users can type in questions, such as who a certain well-known person is and when he was born.