Uberblic V1.0 – stable platform, more data, new APIs

The goal of Uberblic.org is to provide developers with an easy and reliable access point to the Web of Data. To achieve this we integrate web data sources into a central repository and reconcile the streams of data we collect from web APIs. Five months ago we demonstrated the first technology preview of our platform, and collected highly valuable feedback from our users. Now it is time to start showing the results of that feedback to the public: Uberblic.org version 1.0 is here!

With this new version we introduce some exciting new features that will make it easier for application developers to use the integrated web data, as well as to make sure their repositories are kept consistent and up-to-date. Uberblic.org provides a reliable middleware layer and proxy for developers to build production-ready applications over curated web data.

But first of all: the data. We have integrated more and more data sources and we provide data dumps of our repository. Our data sources now include Wikipedia (in English and German), Musicbrainz, Geonames, Foursquare, MovieDB, LastFM, Freebase, several BBC datasets, Drugbank, and Diseasome. We fetch updates from these sources as fast as they let us, for example Wikipedia updates in real-time, Musicbrainz every hour, and many other datasets several times a day. And from Wikipedia we extract high-quality article abstracts in real-time too.

Then: the new APIs. These are very important for us. Having all this consolidated and reconciled data, we can and do provide developer APIs on top. The new Update-Feed API enables people who mirror our repository or parts of it to fetch updates. The Consolidation Feed API helps to keep data links consistent. The Search API and the Lookup API help to find resources. And of course there is Linked Data access and a SPARQL endpoint.

Why version 1.0? Because this is just the beginning. We have more very exciting new APIs, such as our Doppelganger API, waiting to be published, a new platform dashboard, and several applications showcasing the power of integrated web data. So over the next weeks and months we will write on this blog about all the different aspects of the platform, giving further overviews of specific features, and keeping you updated with what’s happening. We’d like to keep in touch with our users as much as possible, and will post to this blog at least once a week. So stay tuned.

But for now, start using the new APIs and data sets, and please let us know what you think of them by joining our mailing list or sending us an email to feedback at uberblic.com

Categorie: General,Project Update
Updated at July 7, 2010 by Georgi Kobilarov, write at July 5, 2010 by Georgi Kobilarov | Log in