Shortipedia is a website that collects assertions from various sources on the semantic web and displays them in an easy to understand format. It finds information about requested topics from Wikipedia, SameAs.org, and Sindice. Users can bind linked entities, see data from related entities, add their own assertions, and integrate additional data. Key lessons learned include that semantic web data can be noisy, hard to understand, and labels are unreliable. Representing diverse knowledge and deciding semantics is also challenging.

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shortipedia
Second-hand facts. For free.
Denny Vrandečić (KIT / Wikimedia.de), Varun Ratnakar (USC),
Markus Kröztsch (Oxford), Yolanda Gil (USC)

2. What is Shortipedia?
o Website
o Based on Semantic MediaWiki
o Collects assertions about everything
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o Provenance of these assertions
o Multilingual labels for everything
o Displays data from the Semantic Web
o Allows easy integration of that data

3. What does Shortipedia do?
o Creates a page on requested topic
o Finds Wikipedia (for identity)
o Uses SameAs.org and Sindice
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o Let users bind linked entities
o Displays data from linked entities
o Let users integrate assertions
o Let users create new assertions

4. Demo time!
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5. Design decisions
o Wikipedia / DBpedia as identity provider
o Don’t trust the triples
o Consistency not required
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o Triples are immutable
o First map, then add
o sameAs is different

6. Lessons learned
o Data is noSi_y
o Data is hard to understand
o Labels are hard to get / unreliable
o The Semantic Web is slow
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o No idea how to represent the diverse
knowledge
o Semantics decided by ‘commoners’, not
experts
o Semantic Web researchers should build a
Semantic Web application

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shortipedia
www.shortipedia.org