DBpedia

This is a follow-up to the previous blog post on retrieving historical art from the Rijksmuseum. Like historical art, film star photos inform us about politics and human culture at particular times throughout history - but there are so many film star photos that it becomes difficult to devote sufficient attention to each individual photo. We can use DBpedia to retrieve historical photos of film stars and display them in our statistically generated scenes of historical events. We'll display both film star photos and historical art that best fit the contexts of our statistically generated scenes - and use the context of the scenes that they are placed in to interpret them for their historical significance.

The recent discussion on the LOD-LAM website have prompted me to begin writhing about some of the data available on Muninn and how it is generated. Creating a database from the contents of war archives nearly a century old presents some special challenges, some old some new. Jonathan Rochkind' flippant remark 'Sorry Linked Open Data people' was made in jest and drew a lot of responses. But it in the end you can't say that text-mining is better than linked open data anymore than apples are better than submarines as they don't perform the same function. Similarly, the problem of interpreting archival contents is central to Muninn's role as well as the question of what is an authoritative source (at least in the knowledge sense). There is no question that "applying statistical analysis text-mining ‘best guess’ type techniques, provides more relationships than dbpedia alone does".