RE: [ANN] Uberblic Search API

Hi Dave,
 
> Does that mean you are back on the lists? :)
>
> Great API - congratulations!

Thanks! (no comment regarding list subscriptions ;-)

> A suggestion would be to add some form of disambiguating description to
> the keyword completion. If I type "Scarlet" then the completion options look
> something like:
> 
>    Scarlett
>    Scarlett Johansson
>    Scarlett Johansson
>    Scarlett
>    Scarlett
>    Scarlett Johansson
>    ...
>    Scarlett Johansson
> 
> Each of the four Johansson entries seems to bring up a different display but
> it's hard to work out which is the right one to use and the order is
> unpredictable.

Thanks for the feedback. The actual API is more talkative than our little javascript search box, see 
http://platform.uberblic.org/api/search?query=Scarlett

that response contains metadata about the entities' type, source, often an abstract, and will later also contain an image link and a search score. The search results html page http://platform.uberblic.org/?search=scarlett displays that metadata too. So that helps at least to disambiguate Scarlett the actress from Scarlett the book, the song or the pub in Texas.

But you're touching on a much more important question: why are there 4 Scarlett Johansson entities in Uberblic? 
The answer is easy: they haven't been consolidated yet. 

Uberblic is built around an approach we call "consolidate-later". It's the assumption that at any time there may be duplicates in the system, merges of entities (consolidation) are part of the workflow, and APIs are in place to assure downstream application can be kept consistent.

For developers that means: pick any URI that refers to the entity you mean (any of Scarlett Johanssons above) and you'll be fine. In practice, that is: if you're building a movie applications, always pick the uberblic entity from The Movie DB. That uberblic URI will always be valid and in the case of a merge that URI will be redirected. And there's an API to track consolidation events as well http://uberblic.org/developers/apis/uri-consolidation-feed/

But of course we are doing our best to consolidate as many entities and as fast as we can.

At the bottom of http://platform.uberblic.org/ (and in the consolidation API feed) you'll see the results of our duplicate detection engine Doppelganger, as well as consolidations initiated by users. 

Doppelganger is continuously traversing the uberblic graph to identify and merge equivalent resources. Last week it was mainly places in Geonames, Foursquare and Freebase, at the moment it's people. There will probably never be a point when we'll say: now uberblic is free of duplicates. But the system is built in a way to ensure that doesn’t cause headaches for developers.


Cheers,
Georgi


--
Georgi Kobilarov
Uberblic Labs Berlin
http://kobilarov.com


> 
> On Wed, 2010-07-21 at 10:48 +0200, Georgi Kobilarov wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > there's a new Uberblic Search API [1] which aims to make the life
> > easier for developers who want to build tagging & search interfaces on
> > top of the uberblic data repository. Or who want a Search API with
> > just a little semantics for finding named entites in data sources like
> > Wikipedia, Geonames, Foursquare, Musicbrainz, ...
> >
> > The API supports simple lookup queries, but also a bit more "semantic"
> > queries. It's like my lookup.dbpedia.org service on steroids...
> >
> >
> > Looking for the URI of the company Starbucks as defined in Wikipedia?
> > "source:[enwikipedia] type:[uo:Company] Starbucks"
> >
> > Or, you know, that movie with Bill Murray and Scarlett ... what's her
> > last name?
> > "type:[uo:Film] starring:[Bill Murray] starring:[Scarlett]"
> >
> > The API supports type-ahead / autocomplete interfaces as well.
> > So if you want an autocomplete-enabled search box for Bill Murray
> > movies, just prefix your query with "type:[uo:Film] starring:[Bill
> > Murray]"
> >
> > Try it out by copying that query into the search box at
> > http://platform.uberblic.org and start typing movie names...
> >
> >
> > Read more about the new API and let me know what you think:
> > http://uberblic.org/2010/07/uberblic-search-api-just-enough-semantics/
> >
> >
> > Best,
> > Georgi
> >
> >
> > [1] http://uberblic.org/developers/apis/search/
> >
> > --
> > Georgi Kobilarov
> > Uberblic Labs Berlin
> > http://kobilarov.com
> >
> >
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 21 July 2010 11:25:17 UTC