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!