The type assignments in DBpedia are very precise (few false statements) but not accurate in the sense that recall is poor; many things fall through the cracks. The real problem is that the the mappings are the map, not the territory. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia for humans, not for machines, so DBpedia has to parse whatever unsane markup they give us.
Systems like Wikidata and Freebase can be edited by machines and human ontologists and get better recall for types. http://basekb.com/ is a conversion from Freebase to industry standard RDF. You could use :BaseKB as a substitute for DBpedia, but DBpedia has advantages too because in addition to the 4 million things important enough to be in DBpedia, there is another 37 million unimportant things in :BaseKB that matter only to librarians, video store clerks and professional discographers. These unimportant things will drive you crazy unless you master them, and the easiest way to turn down the noise is to restrict search to the 4 million things. I could make you an RDF file that has statements such as ?dbpediaTopic a ?freebaseType . you could load that together with the rest of DBpedia. That would get you a long way towards good lists. The trouble at this point is that you don't have the freebase types connected to the DBpedia types so you can't join them against the schema to find properties and such. Mapping the types to the DBpedia types would not be that hard either, since the two systems are well aligned. Then you get something that looks like DBpedia but has more accurate types. Freebase has more accurate and better populated data for things like ticker symbols, geo-coordinates, genders, birth dates and the like. It would not be hard to rewrite Freebase statements to ?dbpediaTopic ?freebasePredicate ?anotherDbpediaTopic . and that would produce something that would be remarkably user friendly. On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 3:09 PM, Roberto Alsina <roberto.als...@canonical.com> wrote: > Hi! > > First, a brief introduction. My name is Roberto Alsina, and my team at > Canonical is using DBPedia in the upcoming ubuntu touch phone operating > system to improve a suggestions engine. > > What we are doing is, when a user searches for something, we look it up in > wikipedia, and then use the entity name in dbpedia to get properties, which > we then associate with different results. > > For example: > > User types "Metallica" => Wikipedia matches => DBPedia says "Type::band" => > We suggest searching in grooveshark and youtube > > All in all, the approach works remarkably well, but we are finding some > missing mappings, and we'd like to help improve DBPedia :-) > > For example: most actors don't have occupation::Actor. Or, publicly traded > companies (example: Microsoft) have a "Traded as" field in their infoboxes > but no matching data in DBPedia. > > For the latter, adding mappings in > http://mappings.dbpedia.org/index.php/Main_Page should be enough, right? > > Looking forward to working on this :-) > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Put Bad Developers to Shame > Dominate Development with Jenkins Continuous Integration > Continuously Automate Build, Test & Deployment > Start a new project now. Try Jenkins in the cloud. > http://p.sf.net/sfu/13600_Cloudbees > _______________________________________________ > Dbpedia-discussion mailing list > Dbpedia-discussion@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dbpedia-discussion > -- Paul Houle Expert on Freebase, DBpedia, Hadoop and RDF (607) 539 6254 paul.houle on Skype ontolo...@gmail.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Put Bad Developers to Shame Dominate Development with Jenkins Continuous Integration Continuously Automate Build, Test & Deployment Start a new project now. Try Jenkins in the cloud. http://p.sf.net/sfu/13600_Cloudbees _______________________________________________ Dbpedia-discussion mailing list Dbpedia-discussion@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dbpedia-discussion
