yes, unfortunately it is broken at the moment.
I hope to bring the search up again soon.

Thanks,
Georgi

well it seems you spotted a bug, which I unfortunately can’t reproduce. When I search for ‘Pete Postlethwaite’ and select ‘actor’, only one result is returned. So if you could tell me how you got there it would help a lot.

Cheers,
Georgi

But I don’t understand one think :
Why does the request http://www.dbpedia.org/search/search.aspx?QueryString=Pete%20Postlethwaite&QueryClass=actor returns firstly movies, even if I precise QueryClass=actor ?

This is wonderful work for demonstrating the strengths of using semantic web technologies to organize and manage data. The tag cloud (and coming facets) are especially useful and important for the function of an encyclopedia as a starting place for people unfamiliar with a body of knowledge to get an orientation to it. I tried to imagine myself as one of my former students in that role, and came up with a neat example of this tool being more valuable than a Wikipedia search that seems to be better, but ultimately is weaker.

I used to teach Anglo-Saxon literature, so I did a search for “Cynewulf.” Wikipedia’s search took me right to the page about the poet, which included a link to disambiguation pages. Seems good at first, but if a student is just being introduced to Anglo-Saxon studies, they miss awareness of other Cynewulfs.

Searching DBpedia, on the other hand, also offered the tags “bishop,” “monk,” “poet,” “saint,” and “sovereign” for filtering. From a professor’s perspective, I think that’s a much better introduction because it would make a student aware of the different Cynewulfs right away (I have little confidence that a student would be so diligent as to follow Wikipedia’s disambiguation link). Hopefully, then, they’d be less likely to be confused by ambiguous references when they go on to doing research in the scholarly journals. At a glance, they’d have learned much more about the field of Anglo-Saxon studies.

It’s that expression of relationships, rather than data in isolation, that makes me most excited about these tools…it will bring big changes to how university faculty and libraries work with students (at least it will if they pick up the ball and run with it!)

Thanks much,
Patrick