Comments on: From Wikipedia URI-s to DBpedia URI…

By: Niklas Lindström

Niklas Lindström — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 16:21:52 +0000

Ivan, thank you for the tip! That could potentially have been an issue for me had you not informed about it.

As for potential solutions (in the “synonym URI” case), I think that having only one URI for a concept is very good from a usability perspective (to limit the risk of people using different URIs for the same thing). Though formally solvable through ontology mechanisms, multiple URIs would complicate many integration scenarios. To me DBPedia is a great step towards avoiding such matters.

Perhaps dbpedia could link to an information page much like this one from their 404 page to generically limit the confusion the present state may cause.

By: Bernard Vatant

Bernard Vatant — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 08:36:28 +0000

Actually the “redirected” URIs of Wikipedia are “synonym URIs”, dealing with URIs the same way people who build thesauri deal with preferred (USE) and synonym (UF)terms (or descriptors). In a thesaurus-based search engine, you use the preferred terms for indexing, and the search using synonyms brings back resources indexed on matching preferred terms. So what we need here is something as a notion of “prefURI” and “altURI”.

By: Richard Cyganiak

Richard Cyganiak — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 22:15:51 +0000

Valentin und Denny are right, we should have these alternative redirected Wikipedia URIs in DBpedia. But I don’t think that they should be sameAs. The redirected URIs are often old cruft, old names that didn’t meet the naming guidelines of Wikipedia and were therefore changed. Wikipedia keeps the old names working, to keep links from breaking, but their use is discouraged in the guidelines. In DBpedia, we should capture the fact that the use of one name is discouraged while the other is preferred. And owl:sameAs doesn’t do this. I’m not sure how we should model this.

By: Ivan Herman

Ivan Herman — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 18:13:38 +0000

Hm. There may be even more the various Wikipedia actions than what I know… I use, in Firefox, the search engine box on the address bar with the search target as implemented by Firefox. If I type in “well tempered” there as a search item, I do get to the article page with the URI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_tempered

displayed in the address bar. Ie, it bypasses the generic search page, ie, it jumps over one step… Which means that, as a lambda user, I do not know which are the URI aliases that Wikipedia really has and which are generated on the fly.

Well, I let the DBpedia folks look at that. I still believe that adding all URI-s (whatever they are) with something like sameAs might be an overkill…

By: denny

denny — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 16:21:17 +0000

Not exactly: the first page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_Tempered_Clavier) is an explicit redirect, i.e. something where people have added that they consider indeed this article when you typed that, whereas the second page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_Tempered) leads you to a generic search page, because it is not part of the database. dbpedia could check for that difference, and I think Valentin is pretty right.

By the way, your first link links to dbpedia though it says Wikipedia.

By: Ivan Herman

Ivan Herman — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 11:35:50 +0000

I do not think so. Wikipedia generates a separate (somewhat “fake”) for each search term. Keeping to this example, if I type “well tempered”, Wikipedia will display the same information with the URI:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_Tempered

In other words, if DBPedia went down that line, it would be forced to generate aliases for all possible search terms that lead to the same page, which would lead to an explosion of URI aliases. I am not sure this would be realistic to expect nor that it would be good…

By: Valentin

Valentin — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 09:55:37 +0000

Shouldn’t one of the conclusions from this episode also be to add these alternative urls as sameAs uris to dbpedia?