Re: [ANN] DBpedia Lookup

Problem: How do I find the URI of an Entity in DBpedia's data space?

You've already seen the solutions from Sindice and Georgi's DBpedia 
Lookup service. Here is our solution, which is basically revisiting the 
faceted "Search" and "Find" demo we put out a few weeks ago.

As per my earlier mail, we have a hot staged DBpedia instance running on 
Virtuoso 6.x (our next major release), and this particular release will 
ship with:

1. Server hosted faceted search, find, and browse
2. Web Service Interface to the browser (*see link on the browser page*).

Back to the problem, let's attempt to locate the URI on an Entity 
associated with the pattern: Telemann. I've chosen "Telemann" because 
Hugh Glaser makes a vital point using this  example in relation to how 
we should start to expose Linked Data utility to newcomers.

Steps:

1. Go to: http://dbpedia2.openlinksw.com:8895/fct/facet.vsp
2. Change focus dimension (facet) to: Type via the link in the 
Navigation section (it's natural to use "Type" filtering to disambiguate 
when we attempt to locate things e.g., in the real world)
3. Now you have a list or Entities by Type, you can  determine what 
specifically you are looking for
4. I assume a planet, so I click on the "dbpedia-owl:Planet" link
5. Now I have one dimension of interest, I flip over to the properties 
of the filtered entity set by clicking "properties containing text" from 
the Navigation section  
6. Then I pick foaf:name as the property that should lead me to what I 
want (which is the answer to my search)
7. Click on the link and get both the URI and a description

Note: This functionality is available as a Web Service [1], we 
desperately hope XML and JSON level developers can use the Web Service 
interface to basically match and exceed Parallax without losing the 
essence of the Linked Data Web (ie. keep: URIs in plain sight of user 
agents via @href when producing Web information resources from linked 
data queries nee. Reports ).

Links:

1. 
http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/wiki/main/Main/VirtuosoFacetsWebService - 
draft of the Web Service API for the faceted browser service
2. http://bit.ly/loLXl - generally misunderstood blog post about 
combining "Search" and "Find" via a server hosted faceted search and 
browse service.

-- 


Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	      Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO 
OpenLink Software     Web: http://www.openlinksw.com

Received on Wednesday, 11 February 2009 19:25:20 UTC