Monday, December 31, 2007
Servers down
Wouldn't you just know it? I no sooner blog about XQuery for Semantic web mashups than the servers in my department at the university go off-line and I guess they might not be back up now till the 2nd. About time we had eXist-db server space in the Cloud I say. I wonder if Amazon would be interested?
Sunday, December 30, 2007
DBpedia and Simile Timeline
Simile Timeline provides a neat way to display events and we have been using it on the FOLD project and on the DSA module to represent the events in the life of music artists and groups, with data extracted by hand from a copy of the Rolling Stones Review. Having discovered DBpedia, it seems obvious to progress to using this data source instead. The XQuery code is presented in an article in the Wikibook
The endpoint is
http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/xmlwiki/RDF/groupTimeline.xq?group=
and the parameter is the wikpedia page name (with underscores)
Some examples:
Only the album cover is displayed in the pop-up, with links to Wikipedia and DBpedia. Coverage of the minimal data required is quite good, but there are gaps, and the format of the release date varies. This is partly due to the need to encode not only the data but also the accuracy with which the date is known. Some wikipedians have used xs:gYear and xs:gYearMonth. The xs:date format, being bigendian, seems to naturally support progressive accuracy, but of course partial values like 2007-12 are not valid. In this example, I 've merely hacked a year out but this is not satisfactory.
There is also an HTML page view of the same data,with added comment text: e.g.
The Allman Brothers Band
A separate query creates an index, with links to both views, derived from a Category:
The next step is to derive a set of life events for the group and group members - births, marriages and deaths - to place on a parallel timeline.
The endpoint is
http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/xmlwiki/RDF/groupTimeline.xq?group=
and the parameter is the wikpedia page name (with underscores)
Some examples:
Only the album cover is displayed in the pop-up, with links to Wikipedia and DBpedia. Coverage of the minimal data required is quite good, but there are gaps, and the format of the release date varies. This is partly due to the need to encode not only the data but also the accuracy with which the date is known. Some wikipedians have used xs:gYear and xs:gYearMonth. The xs:date format, being bigendian, seems to naturally support progressive accuracy, but of course partial values like 2007-12 are not valid. In this example, I 've merely hacked a year out but this is not satisfactory.
There is also an HTML page view of the same data,with added comment text: e.g.
The Allman Brothers Band
A separate query creates an index, with links to both views, derived from a Category:
The next step is to derive a set of life events for the group and group members - births, marriages and deaths - to place on a parallel timeline.
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Football Teams, DBPedia and SPARQL
Having written a number of applications which scrape information directly from Wikipedia pages, I was delighted to discover the DBpedia project. Chris Bizer and his collegues have brought the rather nebulous ideal of the Semantic web to life with this RDF database built on extracted data from Wikipedia, browsable as linked data or queryable with SPARQL. With this resource, I see how to contrast triples and SPARQL with SQL and XML in the DSA course.
My first experiment has been to try to answer a question that has been recently prompted, in part, by the appointment of Fabio Capella as the manager of the England Football team. My godson Oliver and I were wondering just how international our club sides are and what better way to find out than to use the DBpedia data to create a map of the birthplaces of the players in a team.
The result is described in some detail in an XQuery Wikibook article.
Here for example are the players in the Bolton Wanderers team shown via GoogleMap. (you may have to refresh - there's often an initial server error ??)
Being based on an extract from Wikipedia some weeks ago, this data is not quite up-to-date, there is missing data and inconsistancies in property tagging but I couldn't do this without DBpedia - thank you guys.
My first experiment has been to try to answer a question that has been recently prompted, in part, by the appointment of Fabio Capella as the manager of the England Football team. My godson Oliver and I were wondering just how international our club sides are and what better way to find out than to use the DBpedia data to create a map of the birthplaces of the players in a team.
The result is described in some detail in an XQuery Wikibook article.
Here for example are the players in the Bolton Wanderers team shown via GoogleMap. (you may have to refresh - there's often an initial server error ??)
Being based on an extract from Wikipedia some weeks ago, this data is not quite up-to-date, there is missing data and inconsistancies in property tagging but I couldn't do this without DBpedia - thank you guys.
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