Re: DBpedia hosting burden

Since I haven't seen it mentioned yet, I thought I would.

I use dbpedia all the time, but never access it, so there is zero load on
the servers.
And for dbpedia to be at the heart of the LOD cloud, does not mean that
there needs to even be much of a server there.

OK, I do access it very occasionally when my system stumbles across (via
sameas, etc) a new dbpedia URI.

What I mean is that I do use a lot of dbpedia URIs, but that does not mean
that I need to resolve them, or SPARQL the dbpedia server with them.
When someone uses the name "Barack Obama" it doesn't mean they have to
overload the White House press office by asking it for all sorts of personal
details; in fact they might not want to know what the White House thinks
about him - they might be using his name to ask what Al-Jazeera says about
him.
In the same way, when I get a dbpdia URI, that enables me to look up on some
site I care about what the site says about the NIR.

And in term of finding dbpedia URIs, if I want to find a dbpedia URI, I look
whatever I want up in wikipedia, and then use the implied dbpedia URI.

OK, I accept the problems about people who spider it, or want to do complex
queries over it, but that is actually not my view of the LOD world.
My view is that for many applications, I am looking at some small bit of
stuff (say LOD researchers), and so I need to do a few URI resolutions of
the Things that I am interested in, usually in response to some demand.
Possibly I do this transparently using something like the SWCL.

In the general scheme of things, I think that the role of dbpedia
will/should be the provision of URIs with the ability to resolve them when
necessary (and with a reasonable expectation that the client will have a
decent caching policy). SPARQL is a whole different ball-game, and should be
separated out, looking at doing caching, downloads etc..

But the role of dbpedia is to provide URIs and occasional URI resolution to
RDF or equivalent - anything that interferes with that should be challenged.

Best
Hugh

PS.
The situation always reminds me of my mobile.
I use it all the time, but never make or receive calls.
The existence of the mobile in my pocket changes everything about whether my
wife and I need to speak. Because we could if we wanted to, and we know the
other could, we don't need to make the call to say "I am on the train".

Received on Friday, 16 April 2010 18:30:13 UTC