SPARQL me this:


PREFIX dbpedia2: <http://dbpedia.org/property/>
SELECT ?drink
WHERE { ?drink dbpedia2:bourbon "yes"@en}


(For the non-semantic webby, this is a basic semweb query for asking DBpedia for info in wikipedia about drinks with bourbon)

If you think my enthusiasm for the DBpedia dataset and its possibilities is going overboard, just imagine the enthusiasm that's coursing through so many developers that there's something new on the scene so frequently. Their work certainly justifies my enthusiasm.

More ways to approach the Wikipedia encyclopedia-cum-database, made possible by the good folks at DBpedia. This one comes from Patrick Tufts, who is also working on Freebase. He offers up a Wikipedia category browser, aimed at addressing questions like this:

a common question we ask is of the form "what are all the categories that list Wikipedia articles about people?"

The browser is here. Type in a keyword like "bibliography" or "myth" or "technology", etc., and get a list of relevant Wikipedia categories in one column. Then, click on those to drill down to entries (they'll appear in a middle column). Here's something fun--click on an entry, and in a third column you get the article itself, complete with [Edit] tags to dive right in to Wikipedia.

Calling all librarians--DBpedia and projects that make use of it (not to mention broader structured web applications) are opening up multitudes of new ways to find and organize data....we're all going to have lots of fun exploring how best to use them!

DBpedia recently added a search facility that beautifully shows off the power of structured searching--treating content on the web as a database, rather than as a big pile of documents.

Google-like, you have a simple, one-input interface to start your search over the DBpedia set of data, Wikipedia, put into the nice structure of RDF (i.e., semantic web). Un-Google-like, the results pull up an image for the hits if one exists (a very nice touch!). And, even better, you get a tag cloud at the top that you can use to filter the results. So, for example, type in "education" and you get a tag cloud that includes such filters as "academic degree," "professional association, "civil right," "government department," and many more. Click the filters to narrow down your search.

As is to be expected, there are plenty of unexpected tags in the cloud. The tag "party" in the same search, for example (it leads to "Liberia Education and Development Party"). Or "album," leading to a number of albums with the word "education" in the title. That will be both a strength and weakness, depending on the user. To people with a strong training in traditional library searches (lots of booleans and classification systems), it could be a little disconcerting. But, if you put that aside, it provides a way into the data that is more intuitive in some ways. Say, for example, I heard a really great song, but the only thing I remember about it is one word from the title of the album. . .

An overview and vision of the semantic web structured web came up this morning. I'm striking semantic web in favor of structured web because 1) I think it more precisely and accurately describes what we now have--the post uses "structured" just as much or more than "semantic" and 2) the S-web could probably make greater in-roads with a name change. There's just too much baggage and misconception focused on "semantic web" that's holding back adoption. The post either implicitly or explicitly debunks some of those misconceptions.

Here's where they suggest things are going:

I suspect this new era of the structured Web also signals other transitions and changes. Practitioners and the researchers who have long labored in the laboratories of the semantic Web need to get used to business types, marketers and promoters, and (even) the general public crowding into the room and jostling the elbows. Explication, documentation and popularization will become more important; artists and designers need to join the party. While we’ve only seen it in limited measure to date, venture interest and money will also begin flooding into the room, changing the dynamics and the future in unforeseeable ways. I suspect many who have worked the hardest to bring about this exciting era may look back ruefully and wonder why they ever despaired that the broader world didn’t “get it” and why it was taking so long for the self-evident truth of the semantic Web to become real. It now is.

I want to add one more essential group who will, or should, be interested: educators. Much of my enthusiasm for the structured web comes from the same source of my enthusiasm for writing with XML: STRUCTURE, and the ability to recombine and represent information/data/knowledge that that structure fosters. Structure is good. Structure does not "lock-in" or "deaden" knowledge, any more than than the structure produced by printing (the book) did -- it put knowledge in a structure that makes it more versatile, shareable, (re)combinable, alleable. Structured knowledge on the web continues on that same tradition. That's what we do in schools.