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Comment by marcusf | Hacker News Reader

So this seems to be about superimposing the relational model on ad-hoc data? It seems like an idea that has been explored ad infinitum. It also seems like it's for want of a use case, in its current form.

Like they say in the article, the main issue they'll run in to is that people really don't want to build taxonomies manually. My skeptic prediction: Unless they get some really snappy text mining to go with the product, it'll be dead in the water. When you want to ad-hoc mine certain data sets, it's usually because you've just figured out you need some specific query answered. Having to spend several hours structuring the data before you run the actual query seems about as laborious as just doing the original work yourself. Though I might be of limited vision, or just missing something fundamental here.

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We basically have 2 approaches to this problem.

When people have existing data with some structure, they can easily convert this into a semantic Silk site. This can be done using various importer tools (such as our CSV importer) and via the read/write API.

When people are creating new content, we're trying to make it as easy as possible to add semantics/tags. It's as easy as making your text bold and we try to provide instant value to users who tag their content, thereby encouraging them to keep doing so. Some things we do are: - converting currencies - showing how long ago a date was - displaying a map for locations - showing how data relates to other data (tagging the age of a person, will show a list of how old other people in the site are)

So, if you have unstructured data and are looking for one quick answer, Silk may not be the right tool to use. When the data has some structure already, you can easily convert it into a Silk site and then enjoy some Silk magic. But ideally, you use Silk to make some specific content available in a structured manner, so you can use it for a longer period of time.

Ok, very cool. I might misunderstand the use case then.

Do you do any sort of history-based analysis? E.g. solving "I just imported this, which I tagged with a,b,c from locations x,y,z, now I want to import this, that has d,e,f also from positions x,y,z" - I guess Wikipedias info boxes would be a typical example of that kind of semi-structured data. Or does that require setting up an import channel yourself?

The http://world.silkapp.com site was actually built that way. It's a combination of information on Wikipedia & the CIA world factbook. We built a MediaWiki importer for this, that will be publicly available at some point. Also, some of the functionality may make it to the core product, but we'll have to see how this develops over time.

Silk does use pattern recognition to automatically infer data types already, so you won't have to specify that something is a location, date, currency, number, etc. The editor will find out itself. We are working hard to bring this kind of 'cleverness' to more and more aspects of the editor.

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