- From: Toby A Inkster <tai@g5n.co.uk>
- Date: Mon, 25 May 2009 10:35:19 +0100
- To: richard.hancock@3kbo.com
- Cc: public-lod@w3.org
On 24 May 2009, at 08:19, richard.hancock@3kbo.com wrote: > Depending on what you are looking for are some datasets better > starting > points than others? E.g. for finding the towns and cities is geonames > (http://sws.geonames.org/) ,CIA Factbook or some other dataset, a > better > starting point? Certainly geonames would be a better place to start for this sort of query. dbpedia is a wonderful resource for the linked data community, but it can be a bit patchy for certain types of knowledge - not surprising given that its primary source is Wikipedia, which is also patchy in places. (Whatsmore, page formatting of Wikipedia is on an article-by- article basis, which presumably complicates scraping. Templates probably improve matters somewhat.) Geonames probably has less data than dbpedia, and its data is strictly geographical (it won't tell you which famous people were born in a city like dbpedia might). But the data is highly normalised, so you can rely on certain types of data being present. If a city is listed, then it *will* have a name, a country, a longitude and a latitude. Unfortunately, geonames doesn't provide a SPARQL interface. Their database is downloadable though, in tab-delimited format - feature data can be downloaded on a country-by-country basis. -- Toby A Inkster <mailto:mail@tobyinkster.co.uk> <http://tobyinkster.co.uk>
Received on Monday, 25 May 2009 09:35:47 UTC