Re: Linked Data available

Ian,

On 7 Nov 2007, at 23:06, Ian Millard wrote:
> I'm sorry your experience was less than fruitful, and thank you for  
> your
> helpful and constructive comments.
>
> Unfortunately it seems that my earlier tweaking inadvertently broke  
> the
> search and triple browser interfaces.

Yes, that pretty much explains why I didn't have any success in  
getting data out of them ;-)

> This has now been fixed, so
> entering names, paper titles, or key phrases should once again return
> results which you can browse.

It works great now. Thanks.

This removes some of the urgency from my comments below, as it is now  
indeed possible to explore the dataset through the existing browse and  
query interfaces. I still think that my suggestions would improve the  
services, but now with the breakage fixed they are already quite  
useable in their current form.

Thanks a lot,
Richard


>
>
> eg "berners-lee", "ontology design", "fault tolerance",
> "The Next Wave Of The Web", or "The Semantic Web"
>
> I shall discuss your other suggestions with Hugh in the morning :)
>
> Best regards,
>
>
> Ian
>
>
>> Hugh,
>>
>> This looks like it could be an awesome resource. Unfortunately I  
>> didn't have much luck getting any kind of data back from the  
>> services.
>>
>> The "browse" function doesn't do anything useful for me. I searched  
>> for a wide variety of terms, including "the", "a" and "2003" in the  
>> first ten or so datasets, including the one called Citeseer and  
>> DBLP. No results. What am I supposed to put into the search box?
>>
>> I also tried to explore the datasets using SPARQL queries. I  
>> started with queries such as
>>
>> SELECT DISTINCT ?class WHERE { ?x a ?class }
>>
>> to learn about the vocabulary used in the dataset. These queries  
>> return some results on some of the datasets (they time out on  
>> others), but clicking any of the results consistently showed a page  
>> with zero results. Same for opening in an RDF browser.
>>
>> So in fact, despite honestly trying, the only way I could get any  
>> real data back from the services was by using the four example URIs  
>> provided at www.rkbexplorer.com .
>>
>> Obviously a lot of work went into this. It's a shame that it's so  
>> hard to make any use of it because the last 5% are missing.
>>
>> What are those last 5%?
>>
>> 1. A brief description of what each dataset actually is, and what  
>> sort of data it contains. The currently available information (who  
>> provided the data and some triple counts) are not enough.
>>
>> 2. A bunch of representative example URIs for each dataset.
>>
>> 3. A bunch of representative and interesting SPARQL queries against  
>> each dataset.
>>
>> 4. If possible, a note on what vocabulary (classes and properties)  
>> are used in each dataset. This would greatly simplify SPARQLing the  
>> datasets.
>>
>> 5. You should think really hard about ?natural? navigation entry  
>> points into the datasets. Is there any natural ?root? from which  
>> everything can be accessed? Is there a category system or class  
>> hierarchy that one can navigate along to find interesting stuff?
>>
>> 6. You should consider adding a few domain-specific search  
>> functions, such as the simple ?Find Yourself? function provided at http://dblp.l3s.de/d2r/ 
>>  .
>>
>> I'm a bit frustrated because this looks like an amazingly great  
>> resource, but I can't actually get any clear feeling for its scope  
>> or quality or contents. This feels like exploring a pitch black  
>> room while wearing boxing gloves.
>>
>> I'm very hopeful that you can greatly improve this experience with  
>> little effort.
>>
>> Thanks a lot,
>> Richard
>

Received on Thursday, 8 November 2007 12:38:16 UTC