Hi John, I agree with you that there's a need for a simple search interface. I had built such an UI with DBpedia Search [1]. The prototype is unfortunately not working at the moment due to backend problems, but its functionality is briefly explained in our DBpedia ISWC paper [2].
The DBpedia dataset can be used to create a end-user friendly Wikipedia search, as its strong semantics could potentially provide much better results than the current key-text based search engines. But I think at the moment it would be more important to have a URI finder for data publishers. There was a discussion-thread [3] on the Linking-Open-Data list about how such a service could look like. Could be describe your use-case for a search functionality in more detail? Who is the user (end-user or data publisher)? What is he looking for? Cheers, Georgi [1] http://dbpedia.org/search/ [2] http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~auer/publication/dbpedia.pdf [3] http://simile.mit.edu/mail/ReadMsg?listName=Linking%20Open%20Data&msgId= 22478 -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of "John L. Clark" Sent: Friday, December 21, 2007 7:28 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Dbpedia-discussion] Easier simple searches I think that it needs to be easier to perform free text searches on DBpedia. Obviously, for complex semantic queries, the various SPARQL query interfaces provide powerful tools, but finding the URIs of interest in the first place remains challenging. One way to do it is to use one of the SPARQL UIs (I like <http://dbpedia.org/snorql/>) and use a query phrase such as `?topic rdfs:label "your topic here"@en .` For this reason, I think it would be useful if that form defaulted to having that phrase in the body, instead of an ellipsis. This approach has some obvious problems, however. (For example, you need to be careful about the choice of or absence of the language tag, you need to get the label exactly correct, and you need to know a bit about SPARQL.) As a result, I think there should be a more sophisticated free text entry search box, which could use a SPARQL extension or at the other extreme could query Wikipedia directly and then rewrite the result URIs to the "corresponding" DBpedia pages. In any case, I think the chosen solution needs to be prominently included on at least the DBpedia home page, and likely from *every* DBpedia page. I think this should be as simple as a "Search:" input (such as the one that Wikipedia provides on each page). Thank you for your consideration. Respectfully, John L. Clark ------------------------------------------------------------------------ - This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Dbpedia-discussion mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dbpedia-discussion ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Dbpedia-discussion mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dbpedia-discussion
