hi, again! thanks very much for your input.
i'm not so concerned about the accuracy of the data itself, or if i can define the city limits of new york with dbpedia. (i once heard someone summing up IT as "garbage in - garbage out") the problem, i see is of more abstract nature, its the fact that a common protocoll becomes so loose that it's use becomes very basic : humans tend to use their voice to articulate in an everydayenvironment. consider that (the use of voice) as a common protocoll, i could most probably tell if someone from china was angry shouting at me, but i wouldn't know why, because i couldn't understand a word. now what sense does rdf make, if every organization concerned with geonames used rdf to build up their own properties of longitude and latitude (these are just samples). some call them long, lon, l, longDegrees, lonD, lond, longD, longDeg, lDeg, ... now what would the nice man from hyperland do, if i'd ask him about the coordinates of certain place.. a. waiting for the next train @ "mobile ave" b. build the tower of babel c. b while a wkr www.turnguard.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul Houle" <[email protected]> To: "Kingsley Idehen" <[email protected]> Cc: "Jürgen Jakobitsch" <[email protected]>, "[email protected] >> 'dbpedia-discussion'" <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, July 7, 2009 10:14:35 PM GMT +01:00 Amsterdam / Berlin / Bern / Rome / Stockholm / Vienna Subject: Re: [Dbpedia-discussion] new dbpedia Kingsley Idehen wrote: > > I would qualify the problem as being specific to the DBpedia Linked > Data Space rather than Linked Data in general :-) > I'd call the field "generic databases;" Dbpedia and Freebase are the clearest examples, although there's a close relationship with Cyc, YAGO and things of that sort. Dbpedia has strengths and weaknesses. It's got very wide coverage, so it's a reasonable "universe of discourse" for general communication. Of course, breadth of coverage brings with it quality problems. Ultimately dbpedia is useful as a "list of things that people have affective attachments to" -- these items, for the most part, are linked to human readable descriptions, so it's a pretty good start. (All you need is "love.com") The same problems are going to turn up in data that comes from Web 2.0 sources: for instance, you could find videos on youtube that are about many dbpedia topics, but you're just as likely to find something obscene. > Also, how does the geonames data space fair re. your analysis? > Geonames has a good taxonomy for locations. It has some information about data quality. It's also got about 10 times as many points in it as does Dbpedia. I still need something that represents NYC as a polygon, and I'm getting that by merging data from other sources. > You are highlighting what could become anecdotal material re. why > domain specific data spaces are important, in this case, one that's > totally about data for reliable geo informatics etc.. > Well, better ontologies help, but it's hard to please everybody. For instance, I know a librarian who says that Dublin Core is a big step back from what was in the MARC specification in 1969. She's right. MARC was designed for the largest and most advanced libraries in the world, whereas Dublin Core is designed to be something that anybody can understand. Some people would be happy to have a coordinate for the summit of Mount Everest and others would like to draw a boundary between Everest and the mountains around it. Other people are concerned that the the concept of "Mountain" is not well defined. My overall vision in this area is to have interacting data spaces: higher quality (or shall we say higher "resolution") spaces could import data from lower quality spaces, merge it, clean it and improve it, maybe even push something back. Behind all this is the concept of a persistent store, something which is often prohibited by "Web 2.0" API licenses (Flickr, Amazon, etc.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/blackberry _______________________________________________ Dbpedia-discussion mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dbpedia-discussion
