Re: Historical events

Hi:

My laptop is decently built (I sure paid enough for it) and decently
programmed (if I do say so myself) but it certainly doesn't understand that
"Battle of Gettysburg" is an historical event.

Now perhaps you are saying instead that a system that already has access to
lots of general-purpose information (such as the information in the Google
knowledge graph) will already know that the Battle of Gettysburg is an
historical event and thus there is no need to tell it so.

Let's put this particular claim to the test by seeing what DBpedia says
about the Battle of Gettysburg.

>From http://dbpedia.org/page/Battle_of_Gettysburg

About: Battle of Gettysburg An Entity of Type : person, from Named Graph :
http://dbpedia.org, within Data Space : dbpedia.org

Hmm.  This doesn't sound right at all.

So I claim that for even very well known entities like the Battle of
Gettysburg there is a decided use for even just good typing information.


But I think that this misses the point.  I, for one, want more sources of
general-purpose information, and not just for very well known entities like
the Battle of Gettysburg.  I want information about obscure historical
events that may not be in DBpedia or Wikidata or even the Google knowledge
graph.  (Why?  Because I'm working with researchers in cultural heritage,
where this kind of information matters.)  Or at least I want some way of
helping these researchers share the information they have.  I don't feel
that producing information typed as schema.org/Event is going to be helpful
for them and I similarly don't feel that consuming information typed as
schema.org/Event is going to be as helpful to them as information that is
typed with a more specific type.

peter




On 05/31/2018 12:33 PM, Thad Guidry wrote:
> Roger,
>
> Depends on what you are trying to do.
>
> I taking a stance that most of the time there's no need to tell a machine
that something is historical if you can reconcile the entity before hand and
provide data about that.
>
> Most machines will know and understand (if they are decently built and
programmed) to know that "Battle of Gettysburg" is a historical event.
> There's no need to tell most machines that...
>
> HistoricalEvent: Battle of Gettysburg
>
> if you could possibly reconcile your entities (your welcome to use my
community's latest OpenRefine against Wikidata for that)
> and instead of providing Strings...provide Things...
>
> HistoricalEvent: "Battle of Gettysburg
> sameAs: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q33132
>
> Machines can easily find out lots of information by parsing Wikipedia
itself like Google does, if you provide a sameAs url, or perhaps even better
a Wikidata or DBPedia url.
>
> Giving us a better example of what you are trying to do would be most
appreciated by all.
>
> My hunch is that you don't so much care about "Battle of Gettysburg" but
relations around it ?  What are those relations that you trying to establish
?  That it was partOf: American Civil War ?
> What else ?
>
> Help us and we can help you,
> -Thad
>

Received on Thursday, 31 May 2018 20:20:31 UTC