CODEWITHSUNDEEP
sparqldbpedia
Shruts_me
Shruts_me

Reputation: 893

Why 2 different vocabularies for the same attribute in DBpedia?

Why does DBpedia use multiple vocabularies for the same attributes?
I have to get data of all possible movies. For each movie I have observed that it has a dbpedia-owl and a dbpprop vocabulary for producers, directors and so on.. I retrieve the attribute with the following query:

PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
PREFIX rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>

PREFIX foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>

SELECT ?star_name 
WHERE { 
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Goal_III:_Taking_on_the_World> dbpedia-owl:starring ?star.
?star foaf:name ?star_name 
}

I'll have the page id of each movie and then I'll retrieve stars and producers. For some I think dbpedia-owl works and for some dbpprop works.

I am puzzled about it. I have to write code in Python to run this query for each movie. Hence every time I'll have to check that the result is null and then run the code for the other vocabulary.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 185

Answers (1)

RobV
RobV

Reputation: 28655

DBPedia's data is extracted using a mapping based language from the info boxes you see on the corresponding wikipedia pages. Different mappings are used for different info boxes so two different types of resource may be mapped completely differently which is perfectly logical if you think about it.

Now the problem you are talking about is that two resources of the same type having the same data mapped differently. I suspect (though can't confirm because you didn't give examples of two movies which map properties differently) that the problem here is the data in Wikipedia. It may be that there is more than one way to express the information you are interested in within an info box and that the mapping for the info box maps differently for the different ways. This isn't ideal but Wikipedia does not have lovely clean data so you shouldn't expect DBPedia to have clean data either.

You may consider asking a question on the DBPedia mailing list at [email protected] about this to try and find out why this happens as they will be better placed to help you.

Upvotes: 1

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