Hello A few notes on the BBC's use of DBpedia which Dan thought might be of interest to this list: Not sure how familiar you are with bbc web stuff so a brief introduction <skip-me> We have a large and somewhat sprawling website with 2 main sections: news article related stuff (including sports) and programme related stuff (tv and radio). In between these sections are various other domain specific bits (http://www.bbc.co.uk/music, http://www.bbc.co.uk/food, http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature etc) In the main we have actual content / data for news articles and programmes. Most of the other bits of co.uk are really just different ways of cutting this content / new aggregations. Because we don't have data for these domains we borrow from elsewhere (mostly from the LOD cloud). So /music is based on a backbone of musicbrainz data, /nature is based on numerous data sources (open and not so open) all tied together with dbpedia identifiers... In the main we don't really use dbpedia as a data source but rather as a source of identifiers to triangulate with other data sources So for example, we have 2 tools for "tagging" programmes with dbpedia identifiers. Short clips are tagged with one tool using dbpedia information resource uris, full episodes are tagged with another tool using dbpedia non-information resource uris (< don't ask) Taking /music as an example: because it's based on musicbrainz and because musicbrainz includes wikipedia uris for artists we can easily derive dbpedia uris (of whatever flavour) and query the programme systems for programmes tagged with that artist's dbpedia uri </skip-me> === some problems we've found when using dbpedia === 1. it's not really intended for use for data extraction. The semantics of extraction depend on the infobox data and this isn't always applied correctly. So http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies share the same main infobox meaning dbpedia sees them both as tv channels 2. wikipedia tends to conflate many objects into a single item / page. Eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Lane has composer details, duration details and release information conflating composition with recording with release 3. the data extraction is a bit flakey in parts. Mainly because it's been done by a small team and it covers so many different domains. 4. wikipedia doesn't do redirects properly. So http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_watch and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autumn_watch are based on the same data / return the same content and are flagged as a redirect internally but they don't actually 30x. This is confusing for editorial staff knowing which uri to "tag" with 5. wikipedia uris are derived from the article title. If the article title changes the uri changes. Dbpedia uris are derived from wikipedia uris so they also change when wikipedia uris / titles change. This has caused us no end of upsets. An example: bbc.co.uk/nature uses wiki|dbpedia uri slugs. So http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoat on wikipedia is http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/Stoat on bbc.co.uk Apparently people in the UK call stoats stoats and people in the US call them ermine (or the other way round) which lead to an edit war on wikipedia which caused the dbpedia uri to flip repeatedly and our aggregations to break. We've had similar problems with music artists (can't quite remember the details but seem to remember some arguments about how the "and" should appear in Florence and the Machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_and_the_Machine 6. Titles do change often enough to cause us problems. Particularly names for people Nic (cced) has done some work on dbpedia lite (http://dbpedialite.org/) which aims to provide stable identifiers for dbpedia concepts based on (I think) wikipedia table row identifiers (which wikimedia do claim are guaranteed) 7. wikipedia has a policy that aims toward one outbound link per infobox. So for a person or organisation page eg they tend to settle on that person / orgs's homepage and not their social media accounts or web presence(s) elsewhere. Which makes dbpedia less useful as an identifier triangulation point === end of problems (at least the one's I can remember) === So I think we'd be interested in wikidata for 2 (maybe 3) reasons: 1. as a source of data for domains where there's no established (open) authority (eg the equivalent of musicbrainz for films) 2. as a better, more stable source of identifiers to triangulate to other data sources ?3?. Possibly as a place to contribute of some of our data (eg we're donating our classical music data to musicbrainz; there may be data we have that would be useful to wikidata) Have glanced quickly at the proposed wikidata uri scheme (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Notes/URI_scheme#Proposal_for_Wikid ata) and <snip> http://{site}.wikidata.org/item/{Title} is a semi-persistent convenience URI for the item about the article Title on the selected site Semi-persistent refers to the fact that Wikipedia titles can change over time, although this happens rarely </snip> Not sure on the definition of infrequently but I know it's caused us problems. Wondering if the id in http://wikidata.org/id/Q{id} is the wikipedia row ID (as used by dbpedialite)? Also wondering why there's a different set of URIs for machine-readable access rather than just using content negotiation? Cheers Michael http://www.bbc.co.uk/ This e-mail (and any attachments) is confidential and may contain personal views which are not the views of the BBC unless specifically stated. If you have received it in error, please delete it from your system. Do not use, copy or disclose the information in any way nor act in reliance on it and notify the sender immediately. Please note that the BBC monitors e-mails sent or received. Further communication will signify your consent to this.