

Show HN: Tiny weekend project from scraped Wikipedia data: whodiedhere.com - ddod
http://whodiedhere.com/

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JPKab
Awesome work man! Nice to see people making use of DBpedia too, even if it's
indirectly. (I'm sure it would be too slow without putting it in your own
database.)

Are you going to put the source code up on Github? I'd love to see it, since
I'm relatively new to messing around with Node and haven't even touched
Socket.IO yet.

~~~
ddod
I just put it up on Github now: <https://github.com/benwasser/whodiedhere>

After I built this I played around with some other information in dbpedia to
see if I could get anything juicy out of it. No luck so far, but I'm sure
there's a lot to uncover.

~~~
JPKab
Thank you for putting it up there. The fact that you have it all tossed in a
json file is awesome.

I'm curious, are you familiar with SPARQL, or are you querying DBpedia in
another manner? The reason I asked is that I think SPARQL is a cool (flexible,
ultra complex queries) but slow way to get data, and I think node's async file
reads make it ideal for working off of sources like that.

~~~
ddod
Instead of learning SPARQL, I wrote my own script to parse from their format
into my own. I should probably devote some time to learning SPARQL, but
dbpedia's documentation was really confusing for me and I was basically
learning it all just looking through the actual db files.

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gnufs
The search result for 'Berlin' includes Isaiah Berlin
---------------------------- Oxford, Oxfordshire, England

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ddod
Yeah, I wanted to keep things simple and let people search by name, too, even
if it's a little outside the scope of the site. I'll run the issue by the
board of directors.

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anusinha
Awesome project. Are you releasing the source code?

~~~
ddod
Thanks! <https://github.com/benwasser/whodiedhere>

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morsch
Neat. How are you doing it?

~~~
ddod
I had to use a couple databases from dbpedia to get all the information (the
death location syntax wasn't uniform) to make my own more manageable database.

As for the server, it's just Node.js and Socket.IO

~~~
morsch
Thanks for the reference to dbpedia. I had been playing around with extracting
infobox data from Wikipedia -- damn, I thought that was an original idea, but
I guess that was too much to hope for.

~~~
ddod
Their stuff really isn't very user friendly (or at least wasn't for me) so
there's a lot of room for improvement. I'm sure if you made a simple (and
useful) Wikipedia API, you would be loved by all.

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hnriot
The people returned in the results would be much more useful if they were
clickable links back to Wikipedia.

Edit: also, its a little thing, but please add autocorrect="off" to your input
element, the iPad keeps mistakenly auto correcting place names.

