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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

What...is...this? Is there any organization of these datapoints? All I see on the front page is links to single datapoints, such as this:

http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q50000

Which corresponds to "victory", defined as "term that applies to success" , and also known as "win" and "success".

Sorry, but what's the need here? This just seems to dilute whatever's going on at Wikipedia.

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It's a triple store (sort of) "things" and verbs associated. Right now every article in every language has a data point, ie: population on San Francisco, and every article must be maintained individually, in the future you'll be able to reference a data point and it will be updated in every article.

So are you saying that in the future, you could have a system where you type a statement as a description, then conceivably, be able to hover over items in the description for data. E.G.: the statement "San Francisco's population is largely made up of imigrants to the bay area, where an estimated 20% of the inhabitants are actually native San Franciscan born"

Where hovering over "San Francisco's population" would give you the data-point from wikidata?

Is this not the level of parsing that Wolfram Alpha is trying to do?

Also, it would be really interesting to see the following:

Assume you create new google doc, and as you begin typing, in a small window/pane/pop-up, relevant information is displayed based on the context of what you are typing with subtle highlighting. As you typed out "San Francisco's population" that phrase would highlight and the context indicator would display that number.

What would be interesting about this is that if children where using a system like this from their early school days - would they passively absorb such information? would it be annoying or useful?

> Assume you create new google doc, and as you begin typing, in a small window/pane/pop-up, relevant information is displayed based on the context of what you are typing with subtle highlighting. As you typed out "San Francisco's population" that phrase would highlight and the context indicator would display that number.

I've been thinking along the same lines, but for a study prosthetic. Imagine a head-mounted camera that OCRs as you read. So, when you read "Navier-Stokes" there's side-bar with everything that you know about Navier-Stokes, equations, code samples, etc.

This sounds like it'd be an awesome app for Google Glass.

It's an application of the "semantic web". The hope is that one day it will be possible to give a computer the link (or a successor) that you cited, and the computer will in some way be able to "understand" what victory means.

Languages don't have bijective mappings of concepts, so this is a hard problem. Do you have an ontology you'd like to propose?

No, I mean I was really confused. The term "WikiData" seems to connote data of the tabular type, like a central repository for public data. Though I'm also confused at how the mapping for this particular term (for "victory") can't be done in Wikipedia or the Wiki dictionary.

It is, but the problem is whether you are talking about an individual language version of Wikipedia or the Wikipedia project as a whole. In the article they talk about the problem of maintaining Interwiki links on each individual language version, rather than centrally.

This is also just one aspect of Wikidata. The centrality of shared table content is important, too. Why have data in a specific language version Wikipedia and point to it from other versions when you can have a central repository that is pointed to using templates from each language version?

"The term "WikiData" seems to connote data of the tabular type"

There's a strong correspondence between "tabular data" (you probably mean relational) and triples (<predicate,X,Y>). Bot are based on the first-order predicate logic, so there's actually a natural mapping.

Property P107 (http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P107) has emerged as Wikidata's de facto upper ontology. It currently consists of six main types: person, organization, event, creative work, term, and geographical feature. It's essentially a clean port of the high-level entities from the GND Ontology -- a controlled vocabulary developed by the German National Library and released last summer (http://d-nb.info/standards/elementset/gnd).

There's a fair amount of debate over that property. Are those current high level types (person, place, work, event, organization, term) a good fit for a knowledgebase that aims to structure all knowledge and not just library holdings? Does classifying subjects like inertia, DNA, Alzheimer's disease, dog, etc. as simply "terms" make sense?

More reading related to Wikidata, ontology and types: https://blog.wikimedia.de/2013/02/22/restricting-the-world/.

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