Pre-release presentation about http://prefLabel.org – a service for fast RDF entity label lookup.

1. Introducing prefLabel.org
Marat Charlaganov
@charmarat
WAI meeting 27-01-2014, VU Amsterdam

2. Common task: URI -> label
Pattern:
• Use URI’s as names
• Retrieve human-readable labels for (some)
URI’s at a later stage

3. API’s return URI’s

4. Emergent practices

5. Conventional Solutions
• URI dereference
• Guess the SPARQL endpoint
• Use a SPARQL endpoint with loads of triples (e.g.
http://lod.openlinksw.com/sparqrl)

6. Conventional Solutions
• URI dereference
• Guess the SPARQL endpoint
• Use a SPARQL endpoint with loads of triples (e.g.
http://lod.openlinksw.com/sparqrl)
Concerns:
• Non-derefernceable URI’s, constructing a query
requires prior knowledge of the data, postprocessing of the results, downtime, latency

7. Less Conventional
• Sindice API
• …

8. Proposal prefLabel.org
• Best-effort delivery of a single humanreadable label for a given URI
+ Simple API
+ Fast

10. Loaded Data
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DBpedia
Wikidata (using https://github.com/mkroetzsch/wda)
Freebase
~58M labels in total

11. Use case: YASGUI

12. Ideas
• Reverse lookup: label -> URI
• Provenance requests (PROV-AQ?)
• Fetch unknown labels with
conventional methods
• Provide minimal SPARQL interface for
use in federated queries
• …

13. Questions:
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•
•
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Can YOU use this?
Which datasets to load?
Missing features?
…