Tom Morris wrote:
>
> Do properties get deprecated for some period of time before they go
> away? Are there tools to help application writers find their uses of
> deprecated properties? More generally, what strategies can
> application writers use to keep their applications from breaking when
> new versions are released?
>
>
It's a smaller complaint, but I got a little mad that the names of
the files of the dbpedia dump changed. I've got scripts that download
them all and import them automatically, and they all broke because of
the file name change. (Some of them broke because of other changes,
too...)
Generally I'm a distrusting sort of fellow (i-n-t-J), so dbpedia
assertions go through a "closed world" filter before they get into my
system. Something funky turns up with every new dbpedia dump, often
harmless or easy to adapt to. Changing property names sticks out like a
sore thumb: these kind of problems get handled before they result in
broken joins and failing queries.
Overall, I think the the public SPARQL interface is good for (i)
little "touch up" projects against your own database and (ii) people who
write conference papers rather than build working systems. My web sites
get enough visitors that I get complaints about things that are wrong,
even about little obscure things: if I'm making a list of "important"
cities, I'll need NYC, London and Tokyo to make the list.
This isn't just a problem with dbpedia, it's pretty universal in
the "generic database" space. Freebase has pretty much the same
issues, and I gave up on a plan to extract a few thousand "facts" from
the OSM API because, as usual, (i) the API is poorly documented, (ii)
the data format is poorly documented, and (iii) I couldn't get any help
from the mailing list. So I'm downloading the 9GB planet.OSM file and
figure that my "closed world" tools will make short work of the problem.
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