Re: DBpedia Relationship Finder Release 2

Peter F Brown wrote:
> I don't want to be a "party pooper" but you do your cause
> no good with the example that you cite "How are Leipzig and
> the Semantic Web related?" - this is just amateur nonsense
> to claim that there is any semantically significant link
> between the two through a path that depends on the place
> of death of JS Bach - it's just the perverted "seven degrees
> of separation" by another name. Now, if it had come up with
> something like:
> 
> [Leipzig] <---Venue---- [Annual "TopicMaps Research and
> Applications" conference] ----concerned with---->
> [Topic Maps] ----is a---> [semantic web technology]
> ----implements-----> [Semantic Web]
> 
> then you'd have my attention.

Peter, you are right: Some relations found by the relfinder currently 
are not of very high value others however seem to be quite interesting 
(e.g. the connection between Leipzig and Innsbruck being both twin towns 
of Krakow). Did you notice, that in order to be able to find interesting 
connections the relfinder also has a feature to deactivate certain 
properties or attributes. E.g. if you disable the properties 
place_of_death and place_of_birth you find the following more meaningful 
connection:

Leipzig <--city-- University of Leipzig --country--> Germany <--location 
Acronis --industry--> Computer software <--industry-- Ontotext 
--industry--> Semantic Web

As you also noticed, the usefulness of the Relfinder strongly depends on 
the availability of reasonable knowledge bases and this, from my point 
of view, is what the Relfinder really is about: showing people a 
potential use but also limitations of the current SW technology. And 
hopefully that spurs further developments ;-)

Sören



--------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Sören Auer - University of Leipzig, Computer Science Dept.
http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~auer, +49 (341) 97-32323

Received on Wednesday, 1 August 2007 21:10:32 UTC