Re: Semantic Bleachers: was Re: Afghanistan War Diary as topic map in Maiana

Lars,

On Sun, 2010-10-31 at 16:42 +0100, Lars Heuer wrote:
> Hi Patrick,
> 
> [...]
> > Well, but I am not unsympathetic to choosing the Afghanistan War Diary
> > as a possible topic map, to be embellished by others. 
> 
> Go ahead! :)
> 

Err, there are legal consequences to embellishing documents thought by
your local government to be "secret." That the documents are available
to anyone with access to the WWW does not change their legal status. 

I suspect that even suggesting embellishments for others to add would
also fall under the category of there being legal consequences. 

> [...]
> >> I'd suggest to create a proper translation of DBpedia to Topic Maps.
> >> DBpedia has become a focal point of LOD and if Topic Maps want to play
> [...]
> > <sarcasm about LOD and DBpedia deleted/>
> 
> :))
> 
> > What would you suggest as a "mappish view on that data" or what
> > information should we look at adding to it?
> 
> Well, the first step would be a view but editing / adding data would
> be possible. I choose DBpedia because the barrier to make something
> with DBpedia and Topic Maps is very low. Mappify does already a bit
> with DBpedia but neither the mapping is complete nor does it do
> anything useful beside translating an RDF syntax to a Topic Maps
> syntax with a fixed mapping. It doesn't has to be DBpedia, we could
> also use Wikipedia directly, but DBpedia does already the extraction
> job for us.
> 

Ok, so are you suggesting a refinement of the mapping to topic map
syntax as the next step?

I agree there is a low barrier but I am unclear what you are suggesting
as the next step in having a "mappish" view. 

For example, I was looking at some of the downloadable data sets and saw
the preview on disambiguation.
http://downloads.dbpedia.org/preview.php?file=3.5.1_sl_en_sl_disambiguations_en.nt.bz2

The way I would describe the first 15 uses of Austin would be to say the
subject has a property with the value "geographic-name," a property with
the value "Austin," for the US names I would add zip code sets as
properties, etc.

Actually for all US locations I would add zip code sets as alternative
identifiers, which will tie in a lot of US government data. 

For completeness sake I would make topics of all the zip (US) and
postal-codes (non-US). Since they are alternative identifiers, data
available for those identifiers automatically available for other
identifiers for the same locations.

Hope you are having a great weekend!

Patrick

PS: I think assigning properties to subjects and then saying on what
basis we think they are the same as other subjects avoids the pitfalls
of the OWL sameAs which has no properties nor any way for a user to
indicate on what basis they claimed "sameAs." 

PPS: Is this the sort of discussion of "mapness" that you were
seeking?