Have a look what happened today in history
Nowadays, the scientific world becomes familiar with the concept of interconnected data and new possibilities are given to developers.
Wikipedia is an online, open encyclopedia. It contains a large amount of information, which is only loosely structured and, as a result, if somebody wants to find anything they have to do it with the traditional way of text search. One step ahead is DBpedia, which “makes our lives easier” by exporting the information that exists in Wikipedia and converting it into structured data.
Moreover, using SPARQL, a query language made for the Semantic Web, we can look not just for text into Wikipedia documents, but for properties in DBpedia’s entities represented by classes. So if anyone wants to look up for all the articles that refer to wars, all they have to do is execute the following query:
SELECT distinct ?name ?wikipedia
WHERE {
?DBpedia rdfs:label ?name ;
rdf:type ontology:MilitaryConflict.
OPTIONAL {?DBpedia foaf:page ?wikipedia.}
}
This resolves many issues, mainly the ones that have to do with multilingualism, because we don’t have to select a certain language. All we have to do is execute the query in the corresponding DBpedia and we will get the results we need.
This is the idea behind the creation of this application, which informs the user about what happened a day like today, in the past. Similar existing applications are using data that their author has included into the application. The application developed, differs in, that the data displayed have been extracted from Wikipedia with DBpedia queries.
At the back end of the application, the user can choose the DBpedia that will be queried as well as which the queries themselves. The queries are submitted, data is analyzed then exported into JSON format and forwared to the frontend and illustrated into a piechart.
Queries return data such as :
- Title of the fact
- Date of the fact
- A small description
- A small thumbnail
- A large picture
- Link to the related article in Wikipedia
- Link to the cooresponding DBpedia which we got the data.
Here are some statistics on the amount of information that was exported
From Greek DBpedia
From English DBpedia
From German DBpedia
