On 2008-08 -19, at 21:27, David Huynh wrote:
The trouble is of course when the whole web is the database, it's
hard to suggest those relationships (connections) for a set of
entities.
How might one solve that problem? I suppose something like Swoogle
can help. Is that what Tabulator uses to know what data is on the SW?
Swoogle? Centralized index? No, not at all. The Tabulator is a browser
for linked data.
The convention for linked data is that if I do a GET on the URI
identifying something, the returned information will include the
incoming and outgoing links that a reasonable person might be
interested in following. Linked data clients dereference any URIs
they have not come across before, and pick up either data directly or
clues as to where to find what more data. So at each point, you know
what the options are leading on.
When you pick up a set of related things, of course, there will be
some presidents who have children and some who don't. And there will
be some presidents which a have bunch of obscure properties.
Especially once you have overlaid data from many sources. So then
there may be a case for having lenses linked from ontologies to allow
one for example to focus on geneology or political career.
It gets more complicated when you try to automatically build an
interface for allowing people to input data about a president, chose
which fields to offer.
I'd like to see the Freebase data as linked data on the web ... then
we could try all our other UIs on the same data! What would it take
to put in some shim interface to Freebase?
Tim
PS: There are places where a centralized index will help though, like
finding people's FOAF page from their email address.
