On Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 3:13 PM, Nicholas Humfrey Nicholas.Humfrey@bbc.co.uk wrote:
Hello,
This appeared on Twitter but I thought I would email as well and introduce myself. I am the author of http://dbpedialite.org/, which I created as an experiment, to try exposing linked data as RDF using the Wikipedia API.
The things I was trying to improve were:
- Stability of identifiers - using the pageid in the URL instead of the
page title. This was a bit problem for us at the BBC - particularly when doing off-line comparisons in our own databases.
Speed of updates - dbpedia can take many months to update.
Reliability - we have had a lot of problems with dbpedia being offline.
The main thing that the BBC needs is the stable identifiers - so that we can link to other systems both internal and external. We don't actually use the data from dbpedia (at the moment).
As such Wikidata already provides all the functionality that we need! I think it is just a matter of time until the topic coverage is good enough. We are currently working on adding all of the UK Members of Parliament and Constituencies to Wikidata - which is something that we hope to use in a prototype.
I plan to change dbpedialite to use Wikidata identifiers in URLs in the not too distant future:
http://dbpedialite.org/things/Q192
And then if/when wikidata.org supports RDF formats, I will probably turn it off.
Thanks for the update and the work you put into this, Nicholas. Let me know if you need any help from the Wikidata-side.
Cheers Lydia
-- Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher Community Communications for Wikidata
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