RE: imdb as linked open data?

Hi Chris,

Good to hear you. Hope all is well with you guys.

AFAIK Jen Golbeck used imdb data for Filmtrust [1] (not this is not
published as linked data unfortunately, and I'm not sure what the status
is), but in general I think people have given the imdb data a fairly
wide berth in the LOD community precisely due to the licensing issues. I
certainly looked into it WRT Revyu, but instead opted to use film data
from Dbpedia as this is more in spirit with the efforts of the
community. Until the day comes when imdb publishes linkable (and linked)
data then I'd argue in favour of giving the link-cred to Dbpedia.

Last summer at KMi Peter Coetzee produced a pretty accurate list of all
the films in Dbpedia, excluding the items classified as films that
actually aren't. This produced a set of ~12,000 items (down from the
30,000 actually classified as films - sorry Georgi ;) I'd be very happy
to dig this data set out of storage and share it with the community if
people would be interested to see it.

<snip>
> in other words, given the imdb licensing realities, are imdb 
> URIs useful as identifiers even if we can't use the related 
> data? are URIs useful in LOD on their own?
</snip>

In summary I think we should pour the effort into Dbpedia (and related
projects already within the LD space), on the basis that imdb can join
the party later if they wish.

Re using URI's based on imdb identifiers, I think it does no harm to add
pointers to imdb pages (e.g. <film-on-dbpedia> foaf:page
<page-on-imdb>), but one shouldn't mint URIs in someone else namespace
(i.e. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/#thing> is out). However,
there's nothing to stop you minting identifiers such as
<http://mydomain.eg/imdb/title/tt0088846>.

Whatever the target data sets, any concerted effort to create links on a
large scale would certainly be very very welcomed :D

Hope my rambling reply makes some sense,

Tom.


[1] http://trust.mindswap.org/FilmTrust/ 



> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-lod-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:public-lod-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Chris Sizemore
> Sent: 02 April 2008 23:19
> To: public-lod@w3.org
> Cc: Silver Oliver; Michael Smethurst
> Subject: imdb as linked open data?
> 
> sorry if this post seems hopelessly naive, but...
> 
> some questions/thoughts about imdb, if you'll indulge me?
> 
> 
> 
> 1) the licensing seems too restrictive for the purposes of 
> this community, but has anyone taken the downloadable imdb 
> data and tried to RDF-ize it? thoughts?
> 
> http://www.imdb.com/interfaces
> http://uk.imdb.com/help/show_leaf?usedatasoftware
> 
> http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/03/using-imdb-data-for-netfli
x-prize.html
> 
> http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/05/imdb-api.html
> 
> 
> 
> 2) switching focus a bit, could we/should we be using imdb 
> URIs as identifiers for Movies, TV Programmes, and TV 
> Programme Episodes, and (certain) people? i think we should, 
> so, from the best LOD practice (given that imdb haven't yet 
> pulled a dbpedia and provided concept/data URIs in addition 
> to their document URLs), shouldn't i use:
> 
> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/#thing (to represent the 
> gilliam film Brazil in BBC RDF...)
> 
> right?
> 
> 
> 3) what if i published a site that publicly made available 
> RDF such as:
> 
> http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000187/#thing  owl:sameAs  
> http://musicbrainz.org/artist/79239441-bfd5-4981-a70c-55c3f15c
1287.html#thing
> 
> or
> 
> http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000187/#thing  owl:sameAs  
> http://zitgist.org/79239441-bfd5-4981-a70c-55c3f15c1287 (or 
> whatever it is)
> 
> in other words, a set of RDF making equivalency statements 
> about people from imdb across to other datasets like 
> musicbrainz? would this community find that useful?
> 
> in other words, given the imdb licensing realities, are imdb 
> URIs useful as identifiers even if we can't use the related 
> data? are URIs useful in LOD on their own?
> 
> 
> sorry for the ramble, but had a lot of imdb on my mind...
> 
> 
> 
> all the best--
> 
> --chris sizemore
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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Received on Thursday, 3 April 2008 09:07:09 UTC