Z-Blog

API showcase: Linked Galaxy

Posted by jure, under API showcase on June 26th, 2009

Sitting on such a powerful contextual API that returns semantic data is never easy for creative people. We announced a while ago that we output semantic data as part of our API results, meaning that we connect identified concepts to Linked Data cloud. Databases that we link to include Freebase, Semantic CrunchBase and DBpedia. In order to explore one of the possibilities that this brings to developers, @andraz created Linked Galaxy project.

Linked Galaxy is a tool that uses semantic entities that were identified by Zemanta in given text and connects it to DBpedia and Freebase by following connections between them. This way it’s possible to uncover underlying connections between the terms that might not be otherwise obvious to the writer. They are presented in a graph, making it easy to quickly scan the output.

A text about Hudson River landing earlier this year produces the following first order graph from DBpedia:

Once it’s expanded into second order, we can already see connections between the entities (click for bigger image):

Which can be further expanded with Freebase information (click for bigger image):

While all this might seem a bit overwhelming is shows how much information is already stored in Linked Data and the potential of the tools of the future that take this information and build new products and services on top of it.

Give Linked Galaxy a try yourself and let us know it goes. If you are interested in developing it further, we’d love to share the source with you.