- From: Ian Millard <icm@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2007 23:06:34 +0000 (GMT)
- To: Richard Cyganiak <richard@cyganiak.de>
- cc: Hugh Glaser <hg@ecs.soton.ac.uk>, Linking Open Data <linking-open-data@simile.mit.edu>, SW-forum Web <semantic-web@w3.org>
Richard, 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. This has now been fixed, so entering names, paper titles, or key phrases should once again return results which you can browse. 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 Friday, 9 November 2007 15:02:00 UTC