5 ms·

I was just thinking about something like this today (or at least what I think this might be, since I really can't tell from the page). Here is what I want...

I was just thinking about something like this today (or at least what I think this might be, since I really can't tell from the page). Here is what I want... I want a way to query and download Wikipedia metadata easily. For example, I recently saw the Burke Museum released an Wildflower App, but none for Windows Phone. I was thinking I could use Wikipedia to build a very similar app, but I needed to get access to hierarchical metadata (flower type, color, region of the world, environment, etc...). I suspect it's largely there in Wikipedia, but it's not structured (or at least I don't know how to query it). I can imagine this being of use for a lot of things: plants, birds, fish, basketball, football, countries, presidents, trees, foods, etc... Has this been done already? Is it a solved problem with Wikipedia already?

riffraff 14y ago
check out dbpedia's sparql endpoint, or freebase's apis
jpswade 14y ago
Wikidata is a collaboratively edited knowledge base operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is intended to provide a common source of certain data types (for example, birth dates) which can be used by Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia. This is similar to the way Wikimedia Commons provides storage for media files and access to those files for all Wikimedia projects. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidata http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidata ScraperWiki is a web-based platform for collaboratively building programs to extract and analyze public (online) data, in a wiki-like fashion. "Scraper" refers to screen scrapers, programs that extract data from websites. "Wiki" means that any user with programming experience can create or edit such programs for extracting new data, or for analyzing existing datasets. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScraperWiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScraperWiki
mjn 14y ago
That is the direction Wikidata is intending to go, yes. But it doesn't have a lot of semantic data in it yet. In the meantime, some other options that might be useful: There's another Wikimedia Foundation project specifically for species taxonomy: http://species.wikimedia.org http://species.wikimedia.org As 'riffraff mentioned there's a project, DBpedia, which is based on extracting structured data by parsing Wikipedia infoboxes: http://dbpedia.org/About http://dbpedia.org/About For certain kinds of queries the Wikipedia category system already provides some semi-structured data, e.g. you can consult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fictional_parrots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fictional_parrots to get a list of some famous fictional parrots. You can query by category programmatically using the MediaWiki API http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page
- saraid216 14y ago
  > 'riffraff Completely OT, but is this an established HN convention for marking usernames? I've noticed it here and there, and it seems like a goodish idea.
  - gruseom 14y ago
    Well, not really. When you quote a username like this, it means you're talking about the name—the symbol—rather than about the user. So this makes sense: 'riffraff is eight letters long But this does not make sense: 'riffraff mentioned the project ... since names don't talk.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      You're being more philosophical about it than I am. I just wanted to be able to refer to users with names like "the" without putting scare quotes around the names. What I wanted, in effect, was to prevent evaluation of the names in the sentence. Not somehow quoting HN names feels even weirder; writing sentences like "anonymous says we should use the smoked paprika" or "nooonespecial stole our bucket of mashed potatoes" just feels wrong. I'm happy for it to be an idiosyncrasy of mine, though.
      - gruseom 14y ago
        But why quote the name? "gruseom wrote a comment to which tptacek replied" is no different from "Daniel did this and Thomas did that". Is it? If you don't evaluate the names, you end up talking about the names themselves. (Not being pedantic, just curious.)
        tptacek 14y ago
        Because some people on HN have names that are ambiguous in sentence context. "gruseom" and "tptacek" aren't ambiguous; "the" and "noonespecial" are.

riffraff 14y ago

check out dbpedia's sparql endpoint, or freebase's apis

jpswade 14y ago

Wikidata is a collaboratively edited knowledge base operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is intended to provide a common source of certain data types (for example, birth dates) which can be used by Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia. This is similar to the way Wikimedia Commons provides storage for media files and access to those files for all Wikimedia projects. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidata http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidata ScraperWiki is a web-based platform for collaboratively building programs to extract and analyze public (online) data, in a wiki-like fashion. "Scraper" refers to screen scrapers, programs that extract data from websites. "Wiki" means that any user with programming experience can create or edit such programs for extracting new data, or for analyzing existing datasets. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScraperWiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScraperWiki

mjn 14y ago

That is the direction Wikidata is intending to go, yes. But it doesn't have a lot of semantic data in it yet. In the meantime, some other options that might be useful: There's another Wikimedia Foundation project specifically for species taxonomy: http://species.wikimedia.org http://species.wikimedia.org As 'riffraff mentioned there's a project, DBpedia, which is based on extracting structured data by parsing Wikipedia infoboxes: http://dbpedia.org/About http://dbpedia.org/About For certain kinds of queries the Wikipedia category system already provides some semi-structured data, e.g. you can consult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fictional_parrots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fictional_parrots to get a list of some famous fictional parrots. You can query by category programmatically using the MediaWiki API http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page

saraid216 14y ago
> 'riffraff Completely OT, but is this an established HN convention for marking usernames? I've noticed it here and there, and it seems like a goodish idea.
- gruseom 14y ago
  Well, not really. When you quote a username like this, it means you're talking about the name—the symbol—rather than about the user. So this makes sense: 'riffraff is eight letters long But this does not make sense: 'riffraff mentioned the project ... since names don't talk.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    You're being more philosophical about it than I am. I just wanted to be able to refer to users with names like "the" without putting scare quotes around the names. What I wanted, in effect, was to prevent evaluation of the names in the sentence. Not somehow quoting HN names feels even weirder; writing sentences like "anonymous says we should use the smoked paprika" or "nooonespecial stole our bucket of mashed potatoes" just feels wrong. I'm happy for it to be an idiosyncrasy of mine, though.
    - gruseom 14y ago
      But why quote the name? "gruseom wrote a comment to which tptacek replied" is no different from "Daniel did this and Thomas did that". Is it? If you don't evaluate the names, you end up talking about the names themselves. (Not being pedantic, just curious.)
      - tptacek 14y ago
        Because some people on HN have names that are ambiguous in sentence context. "gruseom" and "tptacek" aren't ambiguous; "the" and "noonespecial" are.