I’ve been learning about Geographical Information System (GIS) data lately. More and more projects and businesses are doing interesting things by associating new kinds of data with specific latitude/longitude pairs; this data might be about air quality, real estate prices, or the make and model of the nearest Uber car.

In Pulling SKOS prefLabel and altLabel values out of DBpedia, I described how Wikipedia and DBpedia store useful data about alternative names for resources described on Wikipedia, and I showed how you can use these to populate a SKOS dataset’s alternative and preferred label properties. Today I want to show how to use these as part of an application that lets you retrieve data even when you don’t necessarily have the right name for something—for example, retrieving a picture of Bob…

The following two links won’t do much if you click them now, but if you drag them to your bookmarks toolbar, clicking the first one there while viewing a Wikipedia page will take you to the corresponding DBpedia page, and clicking the second while viewing the Freebase page for a particular topic will take you to the page full of RDF for that topic.

When my TopQuadrant colleague Dean Allemang referred to the use of DBpedia as a controlled vocabulary, I said “Huh?” He helped me to realize that if you and I want to refer to the same person, place, or thing, but there’s a chance that we might use different names for it, DBpedia’s URI for it might make the best identifier for us to both use. For example, if you refer to the nineteenth-century American president and Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant and I refer to him as…

When I wrote my last two blog entries (not counting the announcement about my new developerWorks article), Modeling your data with DBpedia vocabularies and Big legal publishers and semantic web technology, I had no idea that I would soon stumble across a nice collection of US Supreme Court case metadata in DBpedia. After writing about modeling with DBpedia vocabularies, it occurred to me that if Wikipedia has pages with infoboxes for individual professional wrestlers and Battlestar Galactica…

I’ve known for a while about ways to dig into the vocabularies used in DBpedia’s massive collection of triples, and I’ve used terms from these vocabularies to query for information such as Bart Simpson blackboard messages and US presidents’ ages at inauguration. I saw these terms as “field” names to use when querying this body of data.