[I left dbpedia-discuss on the distribution, but I'm not sure why they got tacked on at the very end of the conversation. They'll probably need to go check the data-modeling archives to get caught up on what the conversation was about.]
On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 10:01 AM, Paul Houle<[email protected]> wrote: > Iain Sproat wrote: >> Are we agreed that a freebase topic is a symset (and vice versa)? >> > Here's a better example of a topic that has two meanings, > > http://www.freebase.com/view/en/oxygen > > or > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen > > Wikipedia goes right out and says it..."This article is about the > chemical element and its most stable form, O_2 or dioxygen. For other > forms of this element, see Allotropes of Oxygen." I think Iain was referring to the defined intent of a Freebase topic and a synset. The example that you've identified represents a bug where the difference between the definition of a Wikipedia article (whatever the editors wants it to be) and a Freebase topic (a single concept) hasn't yet been cleaned up. > This is annoying because you can't make entirely truthful statements > about "Oxygen" if you conflate the element and the diatomic gas. Wikipedia is what it is, so it's really up to the users of structured data to decide how much effort they want to put into tidying things up. Unfortunately, there are lots of folks who would be happy to make use of a well structured data set when it's done, but not a lot of folks (so far?) who are interested in contributing time and effort to making it better structured. Unless someone figures out how to break the circle, we'll all be left bemoaning the inadequate and "annoying" state of the data. > It seems to me that the problem is tractable, > but people have stopped short of the work it takes to do it: So did you click the little "split" flag on the edit page? Better yet, did you use one of the split tools to cleave the properties into two sets and distribute them among the appropriate topics for the gas and the chemical element? I agree that "people" need to deal with this, but "people" includes everyone with a vested interest. If you need better data for your app, that includes you. Tom ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Dbpedia-discussion mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dbpedia-discussion
