Show HN: A little knowledge portal I've been building

#1

Post by tuvalie » Wed, Jan 27, 2016, 7:02 AM UTC

Show HN: A little knowledge portal I've been building
tuvalie.com

Re: Show HN: A little knowledge portal I've been building

#2

Post by tuvalie » Wed, Jan 27, 2016, 8:21 AM UTC

Thanks for anyone who checks this out. I'd like to release a free API soon with most of the data the portal contains. That's one of my big objectives since hearing about Freebase shutting down. At any rate, all thoughts and feedback are greatly appreciated!

Re: Show HN: A little knowledge portal I've been building

#3

Post by tokenizerrr » Wed, Jan 27, 2016, 8:57 AM UTC

tuvalie wrote: post #2

Thanks for anyone who checks this out. I'd like to release a free API soon with most of the data the portal contains. That's one of my big objectives since hearing about Freebase shutting down. At any rate, all thoughts and feedback are greatly appreciated!

What would be really awesome (and probably insanely difficult to make) is an API which does something similar to what Google does when you define: stuff. It usually comes from a dictionary, but sometimes it has more interesting sources. I'd love to put something like that in an IRC bot.

Re: Show HN: A little knowledge portal I've been building

#4

Post by mmanfrin » Wed, Jan 27, 2016, 9:47 AM UTC

Man, this is almost exactly a project I had envisioned years ago. I was going over a list of terms I needed to know for a midterm in school, and thought it would be neat if I could just plunk in a list of comma-separated terms and have it fetch definitions, wiki blurbs, images, and whatever else it could find in to cards for each term.

Re: Show HN: A little knowledge portal I've been building

#5

Post by solveforall » Wed, Jan 27, 2016, 9:48 AM UTC

Great work! The UI is a bit old school -- reminds me of Windows 3.1 crossed with some wireframe creation program, but it is not hard to use. But I especially like the timeline and encyclopedic information. Since I run a search engine myself (solveforall.com), I would like to ask you the sources of the encylopedic information, timeline, and quotes. The result that doesn't seem to add much value is the NELL project one, which lists the type hierarchy. Maybe that could just be summarized to "Albert Einstien is a male scientist" ...

Of course autocomplete would be nice as well as more tolerant input acceptance.

I don't get the finder ... do you plan that people will register, then you can find other users that way? This is not a general search for someone by email, right? That would be cool...

I am looking forward to using your API as well! Do the endpoints on https://tuvalie.com/?do=developers work?

Anyway, cool stuff. If you want to discuss further with me, contact me at jctsay AT aim.com.

Re: Show HN: A little knowledge portal I've been building

#6

Post by tuvalie » Wed, Jan 27, 2016, 9:49 AM UTC

tokenizerrr wrote: post #3

tuvalie wrote: post #2

Thanks for anyone who checks this out. I'd like to release a free API soon with most of the data the portal contains. That's one of my big objectives since hearing about Freebase shutting down. At any rate, all thoughts and feedback are greatly appreciated!

What would be really awesome (and probably insanely difficult to make) is an API which does something similar to what Google does when you define: stuff. It usually comes from a dictionary, but sometimes it has more interesting sources. I'd love to put something like that in an IRC bot.

This is even more experimental than the main service, itself, but does something like this meet your needs (genuinely curious)? https://tuvalie.com/fae/?q=Albert%20Einstein&api

Re: Show HN: A little knowledge portal I've been building

#7

Post by tuvalie » Wed, Jan 27, 2016, 9:52 AM UTC

mmanfrin wrote: post #4

Man, this is almost exactly a project I had envisioned years ago. I was going over a list of terms I needed to know for a midterm in school, and thought it would be neat if I could just plunk in a list of comma-separated terms and have it fetch definitions, wiki blurbs, images, and whatever else it could find in to cards for each term.

Funny you should mention that! For registered users, comparisons across concepts are an actual feature. The service tries to summarize on a per attribute, cross-entity basis what makes each item different or similar. It's pretty computationally-expensive, though, so I didn't want to slow down this demo by showing that off. I can post a couple of screenshots of it in action if there's any interest?

Re: Show HN: A little knowledge portal I've been building

#8

Post by tuvalie » Wed, Jan 27, 2016, 9:57 AM UTC

solveforall wrote: post #5

Great work! The UI is a bit old school -- reminds me of Windows 3.1 crossed with some wireframe creation program, but it is not hard to use. But I especially like the timeline and encyclopedic information. Since I run a search engine myself (solveforall.com), I would like to ask you the sources of the encylopedic information, timeline, and quotes. The result that doesn't seem to add much value is the NELL project one…

Thanks for the feedback! What's being demonstrated here is one part of one feature of a larger project I've been working on over the last several years. I've built a lot of custom parsers that continuously mine/merge facts from various sources. (I think it's sitting at around 215 million atomic facts, right now, outside of what it can dynamically calculate.) The APIs work (theoretically), but they're very rough. Showing this project off is very new to me!

Re: Show HN: A little knowledge portal I've been building

#9

Post by solveforall » Wed, Jan 27, 2016, 10:12 AM UTC

tuvalie wrote: post #8

solveforall wrote: post #5

Great work! The UI is a bit old school -- reminds me of Windows 3.1 crossed with some wireframe creation program, but it is not hard to use. But I especially like the timeline and encyclopedic information. Since I run a search engine myself (solveforall.com), I would like to ask you the sources of the encylopedic information, timeline, and quotes. The result that doesn't seem to add much value is the NELL project one…

Thanks for the feedback! What's being demonstrated here is one part of one feature of a larger project I've been working on over the last several years. I've built a lot of custom parsers that continuously mine/merge facts from various sources. (I think it's sitting at around 215 million atomic facts, right now, outside of what it can dynamically calculate.) The APIs work (theoretically), but they're very rough. Show…

215 million facts, that's impressive! Anyway, congratulations on shipping. If you ever want to collaborate on search, please let me know.

Re: Show HN: A little knowledge portal I've been building

#10

Post by tuvalie » Wed, Jan 27, 2016, 10:21 AM UTC

solveforall wrote: post #9

tuvalie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback! What's being demonstrated here is one part of one feature of a larger project I've been working on over the last several years. I've built a lot of custom parsers that continuously mine/merge facts from various sources. (I think it's sitting at around 215 million atomic facts, right now, outside of what it can dynamically calculate.) The APIs work (theoretically), but they're very rough. Show…

215 million facts, that's impressive! Anyway, congratulations on shipping. If you ever want to collaborate on search, please let me know.

I'd love to find ways to collaborate with anyone who's interested :) I also forgot to mention that you can download an export of (most) of the timeline events from http://endlessorigins.com/ -- I update it from time to time with new events, too. To my knowledge, it's the largest freely available structured data set of historic human events. Could that be useful to you?