We had fun with DBPedia the other night - but DBPedia is still a little confusing and rough around the edges (no snarkiness here - I think the project members think so too). I got an illustration of this when I had a look at the property set within DBPedia, the results of which are here. It was just a quick naive survey: What are the properties I can query and how distinctive/useful are they. Turns out most of the DBPedia set of properties are project local and, as far as I can tell, so far have very little structure other than being properties. Places and people have received a little modeling love, so that names, geolocation, birth and death make a little more sense than the rest of the data.
I think this should temper the the semantic web is here optimisim just a little bit. It is indeed nice to be able to filter by infobox-properties and to project down to specific properties - but it is hardly the arrival of another world just yet.
There's a lot of fun to be had coming up with discovery tools though - and for that reason alone the DBPedia project is great.
It's all about the "data => tools => data => tools" virtuous circle.
Posted by Claus at April 27, 2007 10:40 AM