Hi Kingsley,

We are getting a bit off-topic here, but let me answer briefly ...

On 07.02.2015 21:36, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
...
>
> Not it isn't duplication. Wikipedia HTTP URLs identify Wikipedia
> documents. DBpedia URIs identify entities associated with Wikipedia
> documents. There's a world of difference here!

That's not my point (I know the difference, of course). Wikidata stores 
neither Wikipedia URLs nor DBpedia URIs. It just stores Wikipedia 
article names together with Wikimedia site (project) identifiers. The 
work to get from there to the URL is the same as the work to get to the 
URI. Storing either explicitly in another property value would only 
introduce redundancy (and potential inconsistencies). In a Linked Data 
export you could easily include one or both of these URIs, depending on 
the application, but it's not so clear that doing this in a data viewer 
would make much sense. Surely it would not be useful if people would 
have to enter all of this data manually three times.

On that note, is it the current best practice that all linked data 
exports include links to all other datasets that contain related 
information (exhaustive two-way linking)? That seems like a lot of 
triples and not very feasible if the LOD Web grows (a bit like two-way 
HTML linking ... ;-). Wouldn't it be more practical to integrate via 
shared key values? In this case, Wikipedia URLs might be a sensible 
choice to indicate the topic of a resource, rather than requiring all 
resources that have a Wikipedia article as their topic to cross link to 
all (quadratically many) other such resources directly. I would be 
curious to hear your take on this.

>
>>
>> There are similar issues with most of the other identifiers: they are
>> usually the main IDs of the database, not the URIs of the
>> corresponding RDF data (if available).
>
> Hmm.. if you look at the identifiers on the viewer's right hand side,
> you will find out (depending on you understanding of Linked Open Data
> concepts) that they too identify entities that are associated with Web
> pages, rather than web pages themselves.

Sure, but you are confusing the purpose of URIs with the underlying 
technical standard here. People use identifiers to refer to entities, or 
course, yet they do not use identifiers that are based on the URI 
standard. We both know about the limitations of this approach, but that 
does not change the shape of the IDs people use to refer to things 
(e.g., on Freebase, but it is the same elsewhere). Usually, if you want 
to interface with such data collections (be it via UIs or via APIs), you 
need to use their official IDs, while URIs are not supported.

This is also the answer to your other comment. You are only seeing the 
purpose of the identifier, and you rightly say that there should be no 
big technical issue to use a URI instead. I agree, yet it has to be 
done, and it has to be done differently for each case. There is no 
general rule how to construct URIs from the official IDs used by open 
data collections on today's Web.

A related "problem" is that most online data sets have UIs that are much 
more user friendly than any LOD browser could be based on the RDF they 
export. There is no incentive for users to click on a LOD-based view of, 
say, IMDB, if they can just go to the IMDB page instead. This should be 
taken into account when building a DBpedia LOD view (back on topic! ;-): 
people who want to learn about something will usually be better served 
by going to Wikipedia; the target audience of the viewer is probably a 
different group who wants to inspect the DBpedia data set. This should 
probably affect how the UI is built, and maybe will lead to different 
design decisions than in the Wikidata browser I mentioned.

Markus

-- 
Markus Kroetzsch
Faculty of Computer Science
Technische Universität Dresden
+49 351 463 38486
http://korrekt.org/

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