Re: freebase parallax: user interface for browsing graphs of data

On 2008-08 -19, at 21:27, David Huynh wrote:

>>
> The trouble is of course when the whole web is the database, it's  
> hard to suggest those relationships (connections) for a set of  
> entities.
> How might one solve that problem? I suppose something like Swoogle  
> can help. Is that what Tabulator uses to know what data is on the SW?

Swoogle? Centralized index? No, not at all. The Tabulator is a browser  
for linked data.
The convention for linked data is that if I do a GET on the URI  
identifying something, the returned information will include the  
incoming and outgoing links that a reasonable person might be  
interested in following.  Linked data clients dereference any URIs  
they have not come across before, and pick up either data directly or  
clues as to where to find what more data.  So at each point, you know  
what the options are leading on.

When you pick up a set of related things, of course, there will be  
some presidents who have children and some who don't.  And there will  
be some presidents which a have bunch of obscure properties.  
Especially once you have overlaid data from many sources.  So then  
there may be a case for having lenses linked from ontologies to allow  
one for example to focus on geneology or political career.

It gets more complicated when you try to automatically build an  
interface for allowing people to input data about a president, chose  
which fields to offer.

I'd like to see the Freebase data as linked data on the web ... then  
we could try all our other UIs on the same data!  What would it take  
to put in some shim interface to Freebase?

Tim

PS:  There are places where a centralized index will help though, like  
finding people's FOAF page from their email address.

Received on Wednesday, 20 August 2008 12:46:37 UTC