yourHistory – Entity linking for a personalized timeline of historic events

Download a pre-print of Graus, D., Peetz, M-H., Odijk, D., de Rooij, Ork., de Rijke, M. “yourHistory — Semantic linking for a personalized timeline of historic events,” in CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2014.

Update #1

I presented yourHistory at ICT.OPEN 2013:

The slides of my talk are up on SlideShare:

And we got nominated for the “Innovation & Entrepreneurship Award” there! (sadly, didn’t win though 😉 ).

nominated

Original Post

yourHistory - OKConference poster

For the LinkedUp Challenge Veni competition at the Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon), we (Maria-Hendrike Peetz, me, Daan Odijk, Ork de Rooij and Maarten de Rijke) created yourHistory; a Facebook app that uses entity linking for personalized historic timeline generation (using d3.js). Our app got shortlisted (top 8 out of 22 submissions) and is in the running for the first prize of 2000 euro!

Read a small abstract here:

In history we often study dates and events that have little to do with our own life. We make history tangible by showing historic events that are personal and based on your own interests (your Facebook profile). Often, those events are small-scale and escape history books. By linking personal historic events with global events, we to link your life with global history: writing your own personal history book.

Read the full story here;

And try out the app here!

It’s currently still a little rough around the edges. There’s an extensive to-do list, but if you have any feedback or remarks, don’t hesitate to leave me a message below!

#ilps wordle

Top 50 most frequently used words in our group’s private IRC channel, collected between 2013-01-28 and today. The chat has been filtered for nicknames and common stopwords in both Dutch and English.

To be expected: a mix of Dutch and English, the words lunch, coffee, paper, people, uva… did anyone say beer?

ilps

How many things took place between 1900 and today? DBPedia knows

For a top-secret project, I am looking at retrieving all entities that represent a ‘(historic) event’, from DBPedia.

Now I could rant about how horrible it is to actually formulate a ‘simple’ query like this, using the structured anarchistic Linked Data format, so I will: this request “give me all entities that represent ‘events’ from DBPedia” takes me 3 SPARQL queries, since different predicates represent the same thing, but probably I need a lot more to get a proper subset of the entities I’m looking for. Currently, I filter for entities that have a dbpedia-owl:date property, a dbprop:date property (yes, these predicated express the exact same property) and entities that belong to the Event class.

Anyway, if we count for each year how many event entities there are, we get the following graph:

events

Which is interesting, because it shows how there are loads of events in the near past, and around WWII, and around WWI. I could now say something about how interesting it is that our collective memory is focused on the near past, but then I looked at the events and saw loads of sports events, so I won’t, but rather say that back in the days we were terrible at organizing sports events. Still, the knowledge that between 1900 and today a total of 16.589 events happened seems significant to me.

We won the WoLE2013 Challenge

With our SemanticTED demo, we (Daan Odijk, Edgar Meij, Tom Kenter and me) won the Web of Linked Entities 2013 Workshop’s “Doing Good by Linking Entities” Developers Challenge (at WWW2013).

Read the paper of our submission here:

  • [PDF] D. Odijk, E. Meij, D. Graus, and T. Kenter, “Multilingual semantic linking for video streams: making “ideas worth sharing” more accessible,” in Proceedings of the 2nd international workshop on web of linked entities (wole 2013), 2013.
    [Bibtex] 
    @inproceedings{odijk2013multilingual,
title={Multilingual semantic linking for video streams: Making “ideas worth sharing” more accessible},
author={Odijk, Daan and Meij, Edgar and Graus, David and Kenter, Tom},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Web of Linked Entities (WoLE 2013)},
year={2013}
}

Now we get to share an iPad.

Hooray!

SemanticTED