We need a Wikipedia for data • Hacker News Board

Re: We need a Wikipedia for data

#51

Post by bct » Thu, Apr 10, 2008, 9:23 PM UTC

cousin_it wrote: post #50

bct wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does TimBL say that "intelligent agents" will be blindly crawling? Certainly agents have to follow links they haven't seen before (there wouldn't be much point if they didn't), but following links provided by trusted sources is vastly different from what Google does. > The RDF format deals with "triples" precisely to enable inferences ("syllogisms"). As far as I know, this is not and has never been true. RDF de…

Me: >> The RDF format deals with "triples" precisely to enable inferences ("syllogisms"). You: > As far as I know, this is not and has never been true. TimBL, http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.html : > sometimes it is less than evident why one should bother to map an application in RDF. The answer is that we expect this data, while limited and simple within an application, to be combined, later, with data from…

This has gotten kind of confused.

When I talk about merging data, I'm talking about taking two independent documents:

    parentOf 
    name 'Brian'

and

    name 'Brendan'

and being able to join those graphs on the node, to say that a person named Brendan has a parent named Brian. This is what TimBL means by combining data from multiple applications (IMO).

This is trivial for software to do and takes a lot of the effort out of merging datasets. It's what makes the semantic web a web; you're linking different datasets together. I don't see how Shirky's arguments apply here.

--

When I say "inferencing", I mean something like Swish http://www.ninebynine.org/RDFNotes/Swish/Intro.html#ScriptEx... does.

Given two statements:

     parentOf 
     gender

and an appropriate set of rules, an inference engine can create a third statement:

     sonOf

This is what I understand Shirky's article to be about. IMO the applications of it are limited. It can also lead to the ridiculous results Shirky suggests.

Enabling inferences of this kind is neat, and it may be useful in the future, but it's not what the semantic web is About.

Re: We need a Wikipedia for data

#52

Post by cousin_it » Fri, Apr 11, 2008, 6:27 AM UTC

bct wrote: post #51

cousin_it wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me: >> The RDF format deals with "triples" precisely to enable inferences ("syllogisms"). You: > As far as I know, this is not and has never been true. TimBL, http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.html : > sometimes it is less than evident why one should bother to map an application in RDF. The answer is that we expect this data, while limited and simple within an application, to be combined, later, with data from…

This has gotten kind of confused. When I talk about merging data, I'm talking about taking two independent documents: parentOf name 'Brian' and name 'Brendan' and being able to join those graphs on the node, to say that a person named Brendan has a parent named Brian. This is what TimBL means by combining data from multiple applications (IMO). This is trivial for software to do and takes a lot of the effort out of me…

Your first example takes

     parentOf 
     name 'Brian'
     name 'Brendan'

and deduces

    'Brendan' hasParentNamed 'Brian'

How is this substantially different from the second example? Forgive me if I'm thick; I'm honestly trying to understand.

Re: We need a Wikipedia for data

#53

Post by pistoriusp » Fri, Apr 11, 2008, 8:13 AM UTC

Readmore wrote: post #49

pistoriusp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Readmore" perhaps? ;)

HA, nice one! Any suggestions on where to start?

Here you go:

http://json.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON

I use JSON when I'm doing Ajax things. Jquery and Django both have methods to encode/ decode JSON.

Re: We need a Wikipedia for data

#54

Post by bct » Fri, Apr 11, 2008, 2:52 PM UTC

cousin_it wrote: post #52

bct wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has gotten kind of confused. When I talk about merging data, I'm talking about taking two independent documents: parentOf name 'Brian' and name 'Brendan' and being able to join those graphs on the node, to say that a person named Brendan has a parent named Brian. This is what TimBL means by combining data from multiple applications (IMO). This is trivial for software to do and takes a lot of the effort out of me…

Your first example takes parentOf name 'Brian' name 'Brendan' and deduces 'Brendan' hasParentNamed 'Brian' How is this substantially different from the second example? Forgive me if I'm thick; I'm honestly trying to understand.

It's not deducing a third property "hasParentNamed".

It's joining the two graphs so that you can do a query like this:

    SELECT ?parentName WHERE
    {
      ?child name 'Brendan'
      ?parent parentOf ?child
      ?parent name ?parentName
    }

to find the name of Brendan's parent.

You're being quite patient with me, thanks. :)

Re: We need a Wikipedia for data

#55

Post by cousin_it » Fri, Apr 11, 2008, 4:19 PM UTC

bct wrote: post #54

cousin_it wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first example takes parentOf name 'Brian' name 'Brendan' and deduces 'Brendan' hasParentNamed 'Brian' How is this substantially different from the second example? Forgive me if I'm thick; I'm honestly trying to understand.

It's not deducing a third property "hasParentNamed". It's joining the two graphs so that you can do a query like this: SELECT ?parentName WHERE { ?child name 'Brendan' ?parent parentOf ?child ?parent name ?parentName } to find the name of Brendan's parent. You're being quite patient with me, thanks. :)

Still not getting it, here's your second example in that syntax:

    SELECT ?son WHERE
    {
       parentOf ?son
      ?son gender 
    }

What's the fundamental difference? That one example yields a new RDF triple, and the other yields a query result? Surely this is just a matter of representation.

Re: We need a Wikipedia for data

#56

Post by bct » Fri, Apr 11, 2008, 7:29 PM UTC

cousin_it wrote: post #55

bct wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not deducing a third property "hasParentNamed". It's joining the two graphs so that you can do a query like this: SELECT ?parentName WHERE { ?child name 'Brendan' ?parent parentOf ?child ?parent name ?parentName } to find the name of Brendan's parent. You're being quite patient with me, thanks. :)

Still not getting it, here's your second example in that syntax: SELECT ?son WHERE { parentOf ?son ?son gender } What's the fundamental difference? That one example yields a new RDF triple, and the other yields a query result? Surely this is just a matter of representation.

Good point. I think you've changed my mind about the utility of inferencing :).

The difference between querying and inferencing isn't what I was trying to emphasise, though. My point was the difference between being designed for making queries/inferences within a dataset, and being designed for joining distinct datasets.

Querying within a dataset is easy: SQL, XPath, XQuery, LINQ, etc. You can write rules for transforming any data model that you can query.

RDF isn't anything special in these areas (though I do think that SPARQL is an awfully nice query language). What it gives you is a way to link and merge datasets.