On Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 3:13 PM, Nicholas Humfrey
<Nicholas.Humfrey(a)bbc.co.uk> wrote:
Hello,
This appeared on Twitter but I thought I would email as well and introduce
myself. I am the author of
http://dbpedialite.org/, which I created as an
experiment, to try exposing linked data as RDF using the Wikipedia API.
The things I was trying to improve were:
1) Stability of identifiers - using the pageid in the URL instead of the
page title. This was a bit problem for us at the BBC - particularly when
doing off-line comparisons in our own databases.
2) Speed of updates - dbpedia can take many months to update.
3) Reliability - we have had a lot of problems with dbpedia being offline.
The main thing that the BBC needs is the stable identifiers - so that we can
link to other systems both internal and external. We don't actually use the
data from dbpedia (at the moment).
As such Wikidata already provides all the functionality that we need! I
think it is just a matter of time until the topic coverage is good enough.
We are currently working on adding all of the UK Members of Parliament and
Constituencies to Wikidata - which is something that we hope to use in a
prototype.
I plan to change dbpedialite to use Wikidata identifiers in URLs in the not
too distant future:
http://dbpedialite.org/things/Q192
And then if/when
wikidata.org supports RDF formats, I will probably turn it
off.
Thanks for the update and the work you put into this, Nicholas. Let me
know if you need any help from the Wikidata-side.
Cheers
Lydia
--
Lydia Pintscher -
http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
Community Communications for Wikidata
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