Data Wikipedians,
The talk submission below explains my interest in structuring wikipedia
for interaction with machines, so consider it my introduction to this
list.
I hope WikiData will provide a foundation for KBA-type algorithms (see
below), and am looking forward to learning more about APIs from WikiData.
-jrf
http://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/TREC-KBA-Mining-Content…
TREC KBA - Mining Content Streams to Recommend Page Updates to Editors
Abstract: We have organized a new session in NIST's Text Retrieval
Conference (TREC) called Knowledge Base Acceleration (KBA). TREC KBA
challenges computer science researchers to develop algorithms that mine
content streams, such as news and blogs, to recommend edits to knowledge
bases (KB), such as Wikipedia. We consider a KB to be "large" if the
number of entities described by the KB is larger than the number of humans
maintaining the KB. As entities change and evolve in the real world, large
KBs often lag behind by months or years. Such large KBs are an
increasingly important tool in several industries, including biomedical
research, law enforcement, and financial services. TREC KBA aims to
develop algorithms for helping KB editors stay abreast of changes to the
organizations, people, proteins, and other entities described by their
KBs. In this technical presentation, we will give an overview of the TREC
KBA data sets and tasks for 2012 and future years. In addition to
developing text analytics, we are also working on a wikipedia bot for
connecting KBA-type systems to users' talk pages in mediawiki. After
presenting the current state of our bot development, we hope to engage the
audience in an open discussion about how such algorithms might be most
fruitfully employed in the Wikipedia community.
http://trec-kba.org/
(Consider putting your name on the "interested" list in the page linked
above.)