Normalizing company names with SPARQL and DBpedia
Bob DuCharme writes:
Wikipedia page redirection data, waiting for you to query it.
If you send your browser to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Blue, you’ll end up at IBM’s page, because Wikipedia knows that this nickname usually refers to this company. (Apparently, it’s also a nickname for several high schools and universities.) This data pointing from nicknames to official names is also stored in DBpedia, which means that we we can use SPARQL queries to normalize company names. You can use the same technique to normalize other kinds of names—for example, trying to send your browser to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Kennedy will actually send it to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy—but a query that sticks to one domain will have a simpler job. Description Logics and all that.
As always Bob is on the cutting edge of the use of a markup standard!
Possible topic map analogies:
- create a second name cluster and the “normalized name” is an additional base name
- move the “nickname” to a variant name (scope?) and update the base name to be the normalized name (with changes to sort/display as necessary)
I am assuming that Bob’s lang(?redirectsTo) = "en" operates like scope in topic maps.
Except that scope in topic map is represented by one or more topics, which means merging can occur between topics that represent the same language.