Introducing prefLabel.org

Marat Charlaganov@charmarat

WAI meeting 27-01-2014, VU Amsterdam

Common task: URI -> label

Pattern:• Use URI’s as names• Retrieve human-readable labels for (some)

URI’s at a later stage

API’s return URI’s

Emergent practices

Conventional Solutions

• URI dereference• Guess the SPARQL endpoint• Use a SPARQL endpoint with loads of triples (e.g.

http://lod.openlinksw.com/sparqrl)

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, post-processing of the results, downtime, latency

Less Conventional

• Sindice API• …

Proposal prefLabel.org

• Best-effort delivery of a single human-readable label for a given URI

+ Simple API+ Fast

Loaded Data

• DBpedia• Wikidata (using https://github.com/mkroetzsch/wda)

• Freebase• ~58M labels in total

Use case: YASGUI

Ideas

• Reverse lookup: label -> URI• Provenance requests (PROV-AQ?)• Fetch unknown labels with

conventional methods• Provide minimal SPARQL interface for

use in federated queries• …

Questions:

• Can YOU use this?• Which datasets to load?• Missing features?• …