drewp

I wrote this response to a thread on a mailing list, but I can't find anyplace where sourceforge has my reply online (I did receive it in an email). I would have expected it on this archived thread.

So here it is again, at a place I can link to.

On 21 Apr 2008, at 14:40, robl wrote:

>> SELECT * FROM pages WHERE page_title LIKE "Queen%Elizabeth"
>>
>> This would perform a case insensitive match on Queen(anything) 
>> Elizabeth
>> (at least in mySQL).
>>

...

>> Is there quick way to do what I want ?  Are there any indexes I could
>> apply to improve things (I have already created the indexes  
>> specified at
>> http://www.openlinksw.com/dataspace/kidehen@openlinksw.com/weblog/ 
>> kidehen@openlinksw.com's%20BLOG%20%5B127%5D/1298)
>> ?
>>
>> Or do I need to create a conventional SQL table of resource names and
>> then do a SQL LIKE query on those ?
>>

You might also want to check out freebase. Here's the approach I'm about 
to attempt, myself. Start with a reconciliation query:

http://sandbox.freebase.com/dataserver/reconciliation/?name=Queen+Elizabeth&types=%2Fpeople%2Fperson&responseType=html
   - the reconciliation service handles misspellings and other variations
   - s/html/json/ for the machine readable version

Then look at the freebase page or perform a query:

http://www.freebase.com/view/en/elizabeth_ii_of_the_united_kingdom

That page has this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.html?curid=12153654

On that page, we have

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_II_of_the_United_Kingdom">article</a>

Maybe freebase can just hand us that link instead of the curid one. I 
haven't gotten to that part of my code yet. I don't know how often the 
last word of the freebase URI is in sync with the WP one, but that seems 
like it would be the least reliable. Following freebase's designated WP 
link is probably more robust.

Finally, take the wiki name, and make a dbpedia URI:

http://dbpedia.org/page/Elizabeth_II_of_the_United_Kingdom



You probably noticed that elizabeth_ii_of_the_united_kingdom wasn't the 
first result for 'Queen Elizabeth' of type /people/person. I'm not sure 
if freebase considers that a bad result page or not. The reconciliation 
service is new, so now's probably a great time to tell them how 
important good results are to you :)