A gentle introduction to the Wikidata Query Service

Re:A gentle introduction to the Wikidata Query Service by thom on Monday October 19, 2020 @04:04AM (#24824199)

This is one of the best, most magical things on the Internet. SPARQL over wikidata is the closest you can feel to actual omniscience and I never truly understood the value of linked data until I played with it. Everyone should tinker with it!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A gentle introduction to the Wikidata Query Service by wenc on Monday October 19, 2020 @09:55AM (#24826363)

I found a front-end to Wikidata:

https://qanswer-frontend.univ-st-etienne.fr/

I tried "who was harry potter's aunt?" on it but that didn't seem to work. I tried googling the same question and Google gave me the correct answer. I think that Google, despite result skew, is pretty powerful sometimes.

I asked Alexa the same question and she returned the correct answer as well.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A gentle introduction to the Wikidata Query Service by thom on Monday October 19, 2020 @10:33AM (#24826730)

That seems like a suboptimal implementation, when the info clearly exists:

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3244512

Google can be disappointing, however, when you want to ask a question few people have thought of. It would be hard to get a clear answer to "which family had the most members in Harry Potter?" etc, whereas that's a query you can write pretty naturally with a graph database, RDF or otherwise.

I'd never say that I wish we just had massive triple stores and Google had never been invented, but I still maintain that linked data is exciting and expressive.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A gentle introduction to the Wikidata Query Service by JeanFred on Tuesday October 20, 2020 @05:21AM (#24835354)

askplatyp.us is another experimental front-end on top of WDQS − it worked with a slightly reworded question: https://askplatyp.us/?lang=en&q=Who%20is%20the%20aunt%20of%2...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A gentle introduction to the Wikidata Query Service by thom on Tuesday October 20, 2020 @01:41PM (#24840247)

That appears to still just be using 'relative' as a relation, not 'aunt'. You get the same results for 'cousin' etc.

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Re:A gentle introduction to the Wikidata Query Service by 2sk21 on Monday October 19, 2020 @05:15AM (#24824596)

Indeed, I have also been having fun playing around with this. I had no idea that such a service existed until I read this posting - this is what makes HN such a magical resource.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A gentle introduction to the Wikidata Query Service by nicbou on Tuesday October 20, 2020 @02:51AM (#24834544)

Yep! It's mind-boggling. Wikidata is one of the most exciting projects on the internet to me.

[ Parent | on HN ]