Re: The AF war diary

Benjamin,

On Sun, 2011-01-30 at 13:32 +0100, Benjamin Bock wrote:
> Patrick, Lars,
> 
> First, I wanted to comment on Patrick's Blog post, but it doesn't
> allow comments for posts older than 2 days.
> 

I think I have fixed that but then I thought I had fixed the login
problem as well. Saved the settings. Did not even re-open that panel but
a couple of days later, login was required again. I will check with my
ISP to see if it is the amount of spam I am attracting that is the
issue.

Let me cut through all the dancing around. When you say:


> > Indeed somebody sees a value in it. People are even writing mails and
> > ask us to present it on conferences. The main point of the talk we're
> > going to give is not how great the result is but the little effort
> > which was needed to obtain it. 

What result are you talking about?

A) Converting an SQL dump into a topic map?

B) Converting an SQL dump into a topic map, that is then publicly
accessible? The feature is public accessibility? (as opposed to anything
topic map specific)

People may be impressed by that but only if they have never seen a web
interface to an SQL database. 

So without commenting on what others have said or done, name the topic
map advantage that the original posting represents.

If doing it only took 15 minutes, how hard could it be to name the
*topic map advantage* that it represents?

So I can tell people, look at the AF war diary at the TopicMaps Lab and
you will see that ....? What is possible as represented by that topic
map?

Hope you are having a great weekend!

Patrick

 




> On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 5:21 PM, Lars Heuer <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Hi Patrick,
> >
> > [...]
> >> Aki has a good point that occurrence data in such an topic map SQL dump
> >> can be the *starting point for further refinement.* And he actually
> >> posted refinement data to Maiana.
> >
> > Yes, I think that's the right direction.
> 
> I also think that's the right direction - without even having a closer
> look at it. Let me bring some light on how it all started. One day
> somebody¹ came into my office (which I share with Thomas) and
> disrupted us from our work, like it happens every day.
> He talked about this hot Wikileaks thing everybody is writing about
> and what effort it would be to get it into a topic map, i.e. not do
> anything to it except making it available somehow. Our answer was
> short: close to none: Download the CSV, run some regular expressions
> on it, save it as CTM and upload it to Maiana. Done in a few minutes
> by a student assistant.
> While gazing at the horrible result, he found that there are many
> typos, even in the category names, so he decided to load the CSV into
> Freebase Gridworks (which is called Google Refine nowadays) and export
> it from there to CTM which was done in a few minutes, too².
> He uploaded it to Maiana again, wrote a short note to the "somebody"
> mentioned above and then he continued reading papers for his thesis.
> 
> ¹ you may guess who it was but not publish it :P
> ² If I remember correctly, the only things which thwarted him for a
> second was strange literal escaping and the use (and even inconsistent
> use) of literals in CTM.
> 
> >> Sure, I think the TopicMaps Lab should be the origin of such refinement
> >> but apparently they have other priorities.
> 
> Indeed they have.
> 
> > Apparently some see a value in the topic map as it is otherwise they
> > wouldn't peddle around with it.
> 
> Indeed somebody sees a value in it. People are even writing mails and
> ask us to present it on conferences. The main point of the talk we're
> going to give is not how great the result is but the little effort
> which was needed to obtain it. I guess Aki and Lars each spent 10
> times more time on thinking about it than Thomas and I spent on it
> together. Now where are your 10 times better results, Lars? I can see
> Aki's.
> 
> > That point leads me to my initial question: How could Der Spiegel
> > could have benefited from the topic map? I'd be glad it someone of the
> > creators would stand up for the thesis they brought up.
> 
> Probably not so much with this half-an-hour-exercise conversion. But
> the above-mentioned "somebody" had the idea of putting additional data
> into the same topic map: The major cities and their geo coordinates.
> This completely separate additional data didn't even trigger any
> merging, but it provided a tiny bit of added value nevertheless:
> 
> %prefix wds http://psi.topicmapslab.de/wardiary/schema/
> for $r in fn:coordinates-in-distance( "Kabul" << atomify tm:name <<
> characteristics / wds:coordinates , 30 ) return $r << characteristics
> / wds:hostnationwia
> 
> One could e.g. query for host nation WIA incidents near Kabul directly
> without having to look in one place to get the coordinates of Kabul
> and then put them into a query. Instead of looking for things which
> have the name Kabul and getting it's coordinates, one could also just
> use e.g. the geonames identifier. Compared to simple text mining, this
> would also incidents where Kabul is not mentioned in the description.
> 
> Of course this could be done with many other technologies, too. The
> benefit compared to CSV and an SQL dump is just having all your
> additional knowledge in one place and being able to combine it.
> Or is there anything on the web where a non-technical person can
> upload SQL dumps and/or CSV dumps and do structured queries on it?
> 
> By the way: With these few steps of adding identifiers to CSV cells we
> improved queryability and therfore made the data available to the LOD
> who can use the Sparql end point. What are your 3 steps in less than
> 30 minutes to convert the raw data into linked open data?
> 
> What could Spiegel have done? I guess they may have a map of census
> data for larger cities there. Or maybe the locations of whereabouts of
> their reporters. Just throw this data into the topic map and run some
> useful queries. Build hypotheses based on the statistics, verify it
> according to matching incidents or see that it doesn't hold against
> the reports.
> 
> It took a while to write down this E-Mail, so maybe I'm now on par
> with Lars' efforts on (working on UNION discussing) the AWD map. Now
> what about your results, Lars?
> 
> One remark regarding Lars' and Robert's remarks on how to not model a
> topic map: We all know and agree that a 1:1 mapping of relational data
> is not what one may considers a beautiful topic map, but who except
> you cares? It's the same question as if the TMDM is beautiful or not.
> Most people (except maybe the readers of this mailing list) do not
> have their mental models in terms of a topic map. People like lists of
> data and tables of data. That's one reason they use these structures
> all the time. (The other is: they are used to the tools which provide
> easy working with these structures.)
> Just transforming easy-to-grasp table-like data into a graph does not
> provide much value either (or at least it wouldn't be worth the effort
> needed with currently available tools). Topic Maps come handy when you
> want to describe the existing structure (i.e. the 1:1 mapping) and
> match it with other existing structures (i.e. other 1:1 mappings). I
> think nobody want's to spend hours of time to transform data to
> another structure in the hope of maybe better results. It also cannot
> easily be done automatically. I'm not a reporter and not really
> interested in the incidents themselves, so I won't spend a lot of time
> in unearthing subliminal data. In my point of view, it was just a
> quick exercise to see how fast it can be done and how the tools
> available perform.
> 
> Best regards,
> Benjamin
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