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Show HN: A database of everything (over 55M keys)

outpan.com

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Re: Show HN: A database of everything (over 55M keys)

#32

Post by tisryno »

Great concept but I can see it falling out of line very quickly, on the homepage I spotted "berlin -> country -> germany" Followed by "england -> capital -> London"

If you search for the key "germany" it has no results, if you search "london" it finds no results.

The fluidity of the data is definitely a hindrance, if you wanted to use the dataset you'd have to already know what you are looking for to find the value.

Re: Show HN: A database of everything (over 55M keys)

#33

Post by erikb »

outpan wrote: post #14
erikb wrote: post #13

Is 55 million keys a lot for tracking "everything"? My expectation was that "everything" would need more than 55 trillion keys.

"a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step"

Yeah but it doesn't say "we collect all kinds of data" but "this is a database of everything". I can accept the first, but then one shouldn't promise the second.

Re: Show HN: A database of everything (over 55M keys)

#36

Post by 0xmohit »

tchap wrote: post #25
matrix_decoder wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what I thought when I saw this project. Having worked with DBPedia data and the triples format ; I was just wondering how Outpan just stole the idea of Triples and packaged it as a new idea

And then, there's also ConceptNet ( http://conceptnet5.media.mit.edu/ )

This seems interesting. Code for building ConceptNet5 [0].

[0] https://github.com/commonsense/conceptnet5

Re: Show HN: A database of everything (over 55M keys)

#38

Post by OJFord »

ivoras wrote: post #29

Shame it fails for the trap of natural language ambiguity. So on the front page I see "England -> capital -> London" and at a glance I thought the capital (as in money) flows from England and is accumulated in London.

I agree in general (and it's the fault of freely user-definable keys/attribute) - but that's not a great example, since the arrow aren't read as a direction of flow.

Perhaps that reveals that a forward slash might be a better separator though - like a URI.

Re: Show HN: A database of everything (over 55M keys)

#39

Post by smarx007 »

Arcsech wrote: post #3
jitl wrote: post #2

What sort of backend storage does this use?

Given that it's effectively key->key->value, I'm guessing Cassandra for the main backend. The data model fits very well, and it would give you the kind of scalability you would need for this sort of thing.

Given how ridiculously basic the website is, I think you're right. It should have been a real triplestore with a SPARQL endpoint though.

Re: Show HN: A database of everything (over 55M keys)

#40

Post by bpicolo »

smarx007 wrote: post #39
Arcsech wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that it's effectively key->key->value, I'm guessing Cassandra for the main backend. The data model fits very well, and it would give you the kind of scalability you would need for this sort of thing.

Given how ridiculously basic the website is, I think you're right. It should have been a real triplestore with a SPARQL endpoint though.

There are whole databases built around the concept: http://www.datomic.com/
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