Hacks from the kitchen

DBPedia and implied assumptions

We had fun with DBPedia the other night - but DBPedia is still a little confusing and rough around the edges (no snarkiness here - I think the project members think so too). I got an illustration of this when I had a look at the property set within DBPedia, the results of which are here. It was just a quick naive survey: What are the properties I can query and how distinctive/useful are they. Turns out most of the DBPedia set of properties are project local and, as far as I can tell, so far have very little structure other than being properties. Places and people have received a little modeling love, so that names, geolocation, birth and death make a little more sense than the rest of the data.
I think this should temper the the semantic web is here optimisim just a little bit. It is indeed nice to be able to filter by infobox-properties and to project down to specific properties - but it is hardly the arrival of another world just yet.
There's a lot of fun to be had coming up with discovery tools though - and for that reason alone the DBPedia project is great.

It's all about the "data => tools => data => tools" virtuous circle.

The simplest way to local webservices

Running Mongrel as a service has to be the simplest route to very capable local webservices I have seen so far. (For simplest "But I don't even have development tools" route, try InstantRails and SciTE for editing).
The Mongrel Win32 FAQ is incorrect on the start and stop steps though - the plugin does not expose start stop methods, instead just

net start servicename

net stop servicename

I would love for something this simple to exist for perl CGI scripts but I can't think a any drop in solutions. Can you?

Amazon SQL3?

A MySQL storage engine for S3.

DBPedia hackeaften igår

Morten har den bedste omtale af DBPedia hackeaftenen. Hyggeligt, forvirrende og oplysende. Det blev klart for os at DBPedia i sin nuværende form er lidt flosset i kanterne, men at potentialet er der.
Det er også sandsynligt at DBPedia vil give anledning til en masse datarens og konsistenschecks og det er jo heller ikke så skidt.

Vi fik nogen ideer til nogen hurtige tricks man burde lave med DBPedia for at gøre det lidt nemmere at undersøge datasættet og med lidt held er der også nogen af os der får gjort noget ved ideerne...

HEJ CLAUSJa undskyld læser

Din hacks blog er blevet ..

- jeg var lige ved at teste noget sammen med Mr Genstart...

DBPedia hack-aften?

Som man kunne læse forleden her på kanalen, så er der kommet en "semantisk" udgave af Wikipedia, DBPedia - en gigantisk samling af RDF assertions baseret på Wikipedias ganske omfattende data. Jeg ved alt for lidt om RDF og SPARQL og det semantiske web i praksis. DBPedia er en fremragende anledning til at få gjort noget ved det. Morten, som ved en masse om RDF, har heldigvis lovet at være guide til en

DBPedia hack-aften.

på ITU kl 20.00
d. 24/4 (det er en tirsdag)
Lokalet er såvidt jeg husker Marie Curie mødelokalet på 5. sal.
ADGANG: KA godt blive noget rod med at I skal lukkes ind af mig af en sidedør. Ring 22 90 18 86 hvis det fejler. Jeg prøver at skilte.

Program: Tag din laptop med.
Morten giver en DBPedia baseret RDF og SPARQL intro
Vi undersøger hvad man kan få ud af DBPedia sådan hands-on
Vi diskuterer goe interfaces til/anvendelser af de data der er
Vi fortsætter til vi ikke gider mere

Imity lægger hus på ITU - Jeg sørger for kaffe - og at der er en Linuxboks med fornuftige tools og en kopi af datasættet og iøvrigt netværk nok til de ca 10 mennesker vi har plads til.

Som startforeslag har jeg booket lokale m projektor til enten tirsdag d. 17 eller onsdag d. 18 april - altså tirsdag og onsdag i næste uge. Datoerne er yderst negotiable - f.eks. har jeg ikke diskuteret med Morten om han kan de dage - det kan sagtens flyttes en uge. Det er let at få lokaler.

Hvis du har lyst til at være med, og forslag til en bedre dato så kom bare an i kommentarsporet på den her post.

Semantic web: Lets give it a go

Hov convenient for the previous post that DBPedia just launched. DBPedia is a full on RDF-based semantic reworking of the knowledge in Wikipedia. That is interesting. And yes, there's a TON of knowledge I have been looking around Wikipedia for but lacked the querytools to find. The debate on the quality of Wikipedia is another debate than this one. For now, let's see Britannica answer this one with their closed model - have they got a product with similarly rich semantics?

P.S. For a less research oriented and more consumer oriented approach to wikipedia browsing, see Wikiseek.

Open, open, open

Pretty good call to arms, here - except it's maybe a little bit misnamed - since it's mainly a talk about a technological fix for open search and not so much about the economics of search. I too would find it profoundly cool if all the infrastructure to build personal micro-Googles was just standard on webhosting accounts (it almost is, actually) and if these accounts provided seamless scalability (not so much yet, certainly not without thinking on the part of the webhostee), but we would still have the problem of connecting the search to an audience and huge problems with a fragmented question space. The two are the same of course. I added some quick notes on this over on the Wiki.