MadMode

Dan Connolly's tinkering lab notebook

Toward Semantic Web data from Wikipedia

When I heard about Wikimania 2006 in August in Boston, I put it on my travel schedule, at least tentatively.

Then I had an idea...

Wikipedia:Infobox where the data lives in wikipedia. sparql, anyone? or grddl?

my bookmarks, 2006-02-16

Then I put the idea in a wishlist slide in my presentation on microformats and GRDDL at the W3C technical plenary last week.

The next day, in the SemWeb IG meeting, I met Markus Krötzsch and at lunch I learned he's working on Semantic MediaWiki, a project to do just what I'm hoping for. From our discussion, I think this could work out really well.

For reference, he's 3rd from the left in a photo from wikimania 2005.

I use wikipedia quite regularly to look up airport codes, latitutes, longitudes, lists of postal codes, and the like; boy would I love to have it all in RDF... maybe using GRDDL on the individual pages, maybe a SPARQL interface from their DB... maybe both.

Hmm... the RDF export of their San Diego demo page seems to conflate pages with topics of pages. I guess I should file a bug.