Tuesday, June 11, 2013

New Feature on "About Roman Emperors"

As readers of this blog will know, the About Roman Emperors dataset is built upon the backbone of Wikipedia. More specifically, HTTP URIs like http://dbpedia.org/resource/Nero are programmatically created by the dbpedia project on the basis of Wikipedia content, and I used them to identify uniquely each emperor. Web pages and other resources about those emperors are then linked -- using FOAF and other vocabularies -- with those identifiers. These little packages of data about the emperors and their web pages are serialized in both HTML and RDF form on my website.

Today I've added some JavaScript to the HTML views of each emperor's page (e.g., "About the Roman Emperor Hadrian"). When the page loads, the JavaScript fires off a query at the dbpedia SPARQL endpoint, asking for title, abstract, image, and label information associated with the corresponding emperor's URI. Whatever it gets back is presented in the gray-backgrounded column to the right.

See what you think.

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