While we are on the topic of Linked Data, DBedia, etc, I'd like to share a bit about my efforts to enhance the functionality of full text books.
More specifically, I've been programmatically extracting the named-entities (persons, locations, and organizations) from texts, tabulating them, and associating them with Linked Data end-points. The idea is then to allow the reader to: 1) read the document, 2) see at a glance what named entities exist in the document, and 3) do things with the named entities. In the end I hope to allow the person to select a named entity from a display, automatically retrieve the content of the Linked Data end-point, and return a palette of choices allowing the reader to see a map, display a picture, get a definition, find related items, read a Wikipedia article, purchase the item, print the item, etc. One of the bigger challenges to be tackled will be disambiguation. I see a crowd sourced solution in my future.
For a brief but more techno-weenie description of this work, see a Code4Lib posting -- http://bit.ly/kheVeT
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Eric Lease Morgan
University of Notre Dame
Great Books Survey -- http://bit.ly/auPD9Q
Received on Fri May 20 2011 - 10:36:52 EDT