uberblic Search API – just enough semantics
Welcome to uberblic feature spotlight No 1: the Search API. What is it for? Finding named entities in the uberblic repository. Like, you say “Martin Scorsese”, we say Martin Scorsese. You say “Beatsteaks”, we say Beatsteaks. You say “Starbucks”, we say… stop. This is where things get interesting.
You (and the web application you’re writing) probably know whether you mean Starbucks the company (as in this Wikipedia article), or one of the thousands Starbucks coffee shops around the globe, many of which uberblic fetches location data about from Foursquare. And so if you know what you mean, then tell our Search API so that we can help you find the right uberblic entity.
Your Search API query may contain attribute/value pairs that correspond to the metadata (and data) about an entity in uberblic, like source (which is the metadata property for an entity’s data source). So when we query for “source:[enwikipedia] Starbucks“, we get back only entities extracted from Wikipedia, and the company entity ranks first.
To make sure the results are really only companies, we add a type restriction: “source:[enwikipedia] type:[uo:Company] Starbucks“. (Note: the “uo:” in “uo:Company” is the prefix for the uberblic ontology URI, i.e. http://uberblic.org/ontology/).
Let’s look at the Starbucks coffee shops. We find those by searching for “source:[foursquare] Starbucks“, and as this query will return thousands of results, I’ll restrict it to find only shops in Berlin: ”source:[foursquare] Starbucks city:[Berlin]“. However, this will again find all Starbucks in any city named Berlin, so I may want to use the ID (the last part of the uberblic URI) of my Berlin in Germany: “source:[foursquare] Starbucks city:[ab940ab4-cefe-4278-9e9d-404ab4a3a246]“.
Or you’re looking for that film with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson… what’s its name? “starring:[Bill Murray] starring:[Scarlett Johansson]“. Copy that into the search box at http://platform.uberblic.org and press the spacebar, and our autocomplete-enabled search box will already present the result to you…
That’s it for a first look at the uberblic Search API. Please let us know what you think.