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Comment by IanOzsvald | Hacker News Reader

Consider Wikipedia->DBpedia->Wikidata->Wikipedia. First we had semi-structured human-readable information expressed using mediawiki's markup which was hard to parse automatically. Next the DBpedia project (and YAGO) created tools to parse mediawiki and extract facts as triples (e.g. "this thing" "is-a" "company"), they encountered many alternate ways of expressing the same information (e.g. date variants, weights and measures).

Now the Wikidata project (2012) is normalising the data in Wikipedia so that projects like DBpedia have an easier time with the raw information (no need to write alternative parsers for dates, weights, measures and simple facts!). As a result we've gone from human-readable information to machine-readable semantic-web-like information which is accessible via Linked Open Data.

Maybe the driver for semantic web data is humans trying to programmatically consume human-readable information, rather than the other way around?

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Working on the UniProt RDF I find that everytime we make it easier for semantic tools to work with our data it actually improves the usability for human users as well.

The RDF part of the semweb idea encourages us to be extremely explicit with what we mean with our data. This helps our end users because it removes a lot of guess work. What was obvious for us as maintainers is not obvious at all for the biologists who need to do stuff with our data. e.g. http://www.uniprot.org/changes/cofactor (going to be live soon) it's a small change from textual descriptions of which chemicals are cofactors for enzymatic activity to using the ChEBI ontology. This allows us to better rendering (UI) and better searching. It also makes the difference clear between cofactor is any Magnesium or cofactor is only Magnesium(2+).

In the life sciences and pharma semweb has a decent amount of uptake. For the very simple reason that this branch deals with a lot of varied information and often mixes private and public data. RDF makes it cheaper for organisation to deal with this.

SPARQL the query language has a key feature that no other technology has in the same way. Federalised queries: if I am in a small lab I can't afford to have datawarehouse of UniProt, it would cost me 20,000 euro - 30,0000 euro just to run the hardware and maintain it. As a small lab I can use beta.sparql.uniprot.org for free and still combine it with my and other public data for advanced queries. Sure uniprot has a good rest interface but it is limited in what you can do with it in ways that SPARQL never will be.

SPARQL is only interesting as a query language since last year. Schema.org is only interesting since last year. JSON-LD is only interesting since last year. Semweb is finally growing into its possibilities and making real what was promised 17 years ago now.

Of course even in the life science domain many developers don't know what one can do with semweb tech, and semweb marketing is no where as effective as e.g. MongoDB or even Neo4J is. So uptake is still slow but it is accelerating!

Here's something I think should be easy: I want to count the events (by month) on all of Wikipedia's 'year' pages.[1]

First problem: multiple levels of indent, so there needs to be logic for that. Second problem: some pages have weird stuff in the events section, like "world population".[2] Third problem: some pages have "date unknown" events.[2] Fourth problem: all the other problems I'd encounter if I looked at more than two of these pages.

So it's a day's worth of work to get something rough and 2-3 days to get something solid. To answer one question of this kind.

Does DBpedia help me?

[1] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1955

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