Problem: How do I find the URI of an Entity in DBpedia's data space?
You've already seen the solutions from Sindice and Georgi's DBpedia
Lookup service. Here is our solution, which is basically revisiting the
faceted "Search" and "Find" demo we put out a few weeks ago.
As per my earlier mail, we have a hot staged DBpedia instance running on
Virtuoso 6.x (our next major release), and this particular release will
ship with:
1. Server hosted faceted search, find, and browse
2. Web Service Interface to the browser (*see link on the browser page*).
Back to the problem, let's attempt to locate the URI on an Entity
associated with the pattern: Telemann. I've chosen "Telemann" because
Hugh Glaser makes a vital point using this example in relation to how
we should start to expose Linked Data utility to newcomers.
Steps:
1. Go to: http://dbpedia2.openlinksw.com:8895/fct/facet.vsp
2. Change focus dimension (facet) to: Type via the link in the
Navigation section (it's natural to use "Type" filtering to disambiguate
when we attempt to locate things e.g., in the real world)
3. Now you have a list or Entities by Type, you can determine what
specifically you are looking for
4. I assume a planet, so I click on the "dbpedia-owl:Planet" link
5. Now I have one dimension of interest, I flip over to the properties
of the filtered entity set by clicking "properties containing text" from
the Navigation section
6. Then I pick foaf:name as the property that should lead me to what I
want (which is the answer to my search)
7. Click on the link and get both the URI and a description
Note: This functionality is available as a Web Service [1], we
desperately hope XML and JSON level developers can use the Web Service
interface to basically match and exceed Parallax without losing the
essence of the Linked Data Web (ie. keep: URIs in plain sight of user
agents via @href when producing Web information resources from linked
data queries nee. Reports ).
Links:
1.
http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/wiki/main/Main/VirtuosoFacetsWebService -
draft of the Web Service API for the faceted browser service
2. http://bit.ly/loLXl - generally misunderstood blog post about
combining "Search" and "Find" via a server hosted faceted search and
browse service.
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
