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Show HN: Tiny weekend project from scraped Wikipedia data: whodiedhere.com
- gnufs 14y agoThe search result for 'Berlin' includes Isaiah Berlin ---------------------------- Oxford, Oxfordshire, England
- ddod 14y agoYeah, I wanted to keep things simple and let people search by name, too, even if it's a little outside the scope of the site. I'll run the issue by the board of directors.
- morsch 14y agoNeat. How are you doing it?
- ddod 14y agoI had to use a couple databases from dbpedia to get all the information (the death location syntax wasn't uniform) to make my own more manageable database. As for the server, it's just Node.js and Socket.IO
- morsch 14y agoThanks for the reference to dbpedia. I had been playing around with extracting infobox data from Wikipedia -- damn, I thought that was an original idea, but I guess that was too much to hope for.
- ddod 14y agoTheir stuff really isn't very user friendly (or at least wasn't for me) so there's a lot of room for improvement. I'm sure if you made a simple (and useful) Wikipedia API, you would be loved by all.
- hnriot 14y agoThe people returned in the results would be much more useful if they were clickable links back to Wikipedia. Edit: also, its a little thing, but please add autocorrect="off" to your input element, the iPad keeps mistakenly auto correcting place names.
- anusinha 14y agoAwesome project. Are you releasing the source code?
- ddod 14y agoThanks! https://github.com/benwasser/whodiedhere https://github.com/benwasser/whodiedhere
- JPKab 14y agoAwesome work man! Nice to see people making use of DBpedia too, even if it's indirectly. (I'm sure it would be too slow without putting it in your own database.) Are you going to put the source code up on Github? I'd love to see it, since I'm relatively new to messing around with Node and haven't even touched Socket.IO yet.
- ddod 14y agoI just put it up on Github now: https://github.com/benwasser/whodiedhere https://github.com/benwasser/whodiedhere After I built this I played around with some other information in dbpedia to see if I could get anything juicy out of it. No luck so far, but I'm sure there's a lot to uncover.
- JPKab 14y agoThank you for putting it up there. The fact that you have it all tossed in a json file is awesome. I'm curious, are you familiar with SPARQL, or are you querying DBpedia in another manner? The reason I asked is that I think SPARQL is a cool (flexible, ultra complex queries) but slow way to get data, and I think node's async file reads make it ideal for working off of sources like that.
- ddod 14y agoInstead of learning SPARQL, I wrote my own script to parse from their format into my own. I should probably devote some time to learning SPARQL, but dbpedia's documentation was really confusing for me and I was basically learning it all just looking through the actual db files.