Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comparison with Freebase:

> Simpler structure: There are no datatypes, namespaces, lists, domains. Just ordered nodes. Having a dead simple structure like that allows developers to quickly and intuitively know how to access the info they want.

I don't see how this makes it simpler or intuitive at ALL. If there's no convention as to whether I should search for "born on" or "born_date" or "year_born", or whether the date will be "1900-08-01" or "08-01-1900" or "1900/08"... then how is this supposed to be useful?

The central problem is, there are lots of textual ways of describing the same thing. Without standardized datatypes and standardized tags, it quickly becomes a messy, useless free-for-all.

I don't see how TheBigDB gets around this. The FAQ explains how it's different from Freebase/Wikidata, but I don't at all understand how it's supposed to be better, or even as good.

View on HN

This is stupid. I hate to say it, but by taking all of the complexity out of Freebase, they forgot the problem Freebase was trying to solve: Semantic integration

Right on the front page they have their biggest flaw in the example:

Apple weight 150g

Ok, so what about the company Apple? How are they semantically distinguishing one item from another? I guess Steve Jobs is Founder of a Fruit that weighs 150 grams.

What you're talking about is the larger problem of "context". Thankfully, I already wrote the code and the documentation to attach statements to contexts, solving this problem in an elegant way. I haven't released it yet to keep the core of the service simple, and to help people understand what it does first.

It will be released when it will be the right time for it. Thanks for your comment!

I apologize for calling your project stupid. I should not have done that. I'm interested in seeing what you are doing on context. Thanks for being classy.

No problem, I'm not afraid of criticism and insults, there is always some kind of information in them :)

When you start assigning context to statments, you'll quickly find yourself walking down the path to structured data, and toward the very complexity you're arguing against. At least predicate-wise.

You'll then need to start assigning contexts to entities, at which point you're right about where Freebase begins, in principle. Even if we assume you use Wikipedia-esque strings like "Apple (company)"

Triples are easy. Semantics are hard.

Yes, whatever I do is making me "walking down the path to structured data, and toward the very complexity you're arguing against", that's why it is done in a way where those principles are still preserved.

I don't want to talk too much about a structure that I haven't released yet, but let me assure you there's a way that doesn't end up where Freebase is. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.</seinfeld>)

Wikipedia had a similar issue and conventions just evolved over time. I could see that happening here.

It's all about conventions, redundancy and votes. When you know what you're looking for, and you got a community agreeing on such conventions, you know you'll get what you're actually looking for. That's pretty much it.

And yes, it is different, "better" depends on what you're trying to do with it :)

Agree. It's like WikiPedia: Make it easy for the community to decide how to organize it. Nothing stopping anyone from just populating this db in whatever format they prefer then publishing their own docs explaining their data model ... Let the audience decide if that's useful or not.

Without an ontology this is not a facts database more than a graph of strings. It can be interesting anyway, maybe an ontology will emerge from it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com