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Comment by adam_bly | Hacker News Reader

No, Wikidata is an open database of semantic definitions and relationships. System is a public resource that aims to explain how anything in the world is related to everything else based on statistical evidence. Semantic vs statistical is the difference.

System is possible today because of Wikidata and the advancement of open knowledge: All definitions on System are sourced from Wikidata. System will contribute back to the open knowledge commons with a new, free, open, and living knowledge base of statistically-based relationships between things in the world.

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>System is a public resource that aims to explain how anything in the world is related to everything else based on statistical evidence

People have made a game out of finding spurious correlations that are both impressive and funny.

For now the site seems to have a focus on Medicine. That's great because we spend a whole lot of money running RCTs and collecting trial data. But the stakes are also very high.

How do you make sure that System doesn't accidentally become a public resource that explains how anything is (spuriously) related to everything else by confounders and unfortunate correlations?

And we're big fans of those often hilarious spurious correlations!

But System filters them out (methodologies here: https://docs.system.com/system/using-system/investigating-re... and here: https://docs.system.com/system/how-system-works/relationship...).

Relationships on System are gathered, stored, and presented with a variety of contextualizing fields designed to help System and users evaluate and weigh the evidence. These include Strength, Sign, Direction, Population, Controls, and Reproducibility.

ICYI we discuss and review these methodologies on our slack community (link on system.com).

Is the pope catholic, or statistically related to catholicism? Is Chicago related to Illinois by published evidence? Thank you, and congrats on the launch. I loved freebase, and desperately want it back. If this works, please don’t sell.

(note: I am the Director of Data Science at System)

We love wrestling with these types of questions at System. The examples that you gave are "semantic" on System. You find those connections in Wikidata for example. (Q19546 -> Q9592 -> Q1841 or Q1297 -> Q1204). A relationship is statistical (as defined on System) if you can estimate its strength statistically, in a population and with certain statistical confidence.

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