[seqfan] Re: Linked Open Data (LOD) and the OEIS

[Neil Sloane]

Marc, That's an interesting suggestion.

The obvious questions are,
how much would it cost to hire someone to do this,
and
who would we pay to do it?

I think if we can answer these two questions then we might well
be able to find the money.

Neil


On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 1:08 PM, Marc LeBrun <mlb at well.com> wrote:

> I was reminded again recently that the OEIS would be an ideal database to
> contribute to the world's knowledge in the form of "Linked Open Data"
> (LOD).
>
> You can easily find more about LOD by searching the web; an introduction is
> here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_data
>
> Briefly, LOD is a foundation for the "semantic web", and is actively being
> advocated by Tim Berners-Lee, the W3C and others.
>
> Wikipedia notes the LOD available on the web grew from 2 billion triples in
> 2009 to 31 billion in 2011.  There are many domains represented, including
> medicine, law, media, science and others.  The OEIS would be a natural fit.
>
> There are powerful technologies available for using LOD and more will be
> coming.  These would complement the OEIS "native" mathematical strengths
> (such as lookup and superseeker) to help address all the OTHER valuable
> "metadata" that is included in each entry.
>
> Some amazing applications have already been built federating data from
> different domains.   For example crossing pharmaceutical info and medical
> research.  The OEIS would naturally federate with things like publication
> citation databases, and so on.
>
> LOD is a hot topic these days, and I believe the OEISF could perhaps even
> get some support to help it join the semantic web community.
>
> Of course many of us are very busy, but I think this is an exciting idea,
> so
> if you are personally interested in pursuing LOD for the OEIS further
> please
> let me know (off list) and maybe we can figure out a good way to
> collaborate
> on it somehow...
>
> --MLB
>
>
> ========
>
> To make this more concrete and relevant here's a brief description of what
> LOD would be like from the perspective of the OEIS:
>
> The basis of LOD is to reference everything with HTTP URIs.  Of course all
> the OEIS entries are already identified in this way.  For example A007317,
> "Binomial transform of Catalan numbers", has the URL
> http://oeis.org/A007317 and so forth.
>
> Building on that URI foundation, all other knowledge is represented as
> triples (implemented in RDF) that describe relationships between entities.
>
> For example some (informal) triples related to A007317 would include:
>
>  A007317  --hasName-->  "Binomial transform of Catalan numbers"
>
>  A007317  --binomialTransform--> A000108
>
>  A000108  --isCalled-->  "Catalan numbers"
>
>  A000108  --isCalled-->  "Segner numbers"
>
> Similarly other entities can be ID'd, say http://oeis.org/user/Marc+LeBrun
> and used (eg in "hasAuthor" triples), related to eachother and so on.
>
> The triple "schema" is itself also represented as triples, and thus is used
> to provide an ontology of the domain:
>
>  binomialTransform  --hasInverse-->  inverseBinomialTransform
>
> This allows automatic reasoners to make useful deductions like
>
>  A000108  --inverseBinomialTransform-->  A007317
>
> and many more complicated inferences, removing the need to explicitly
> represent them in the database itself.
>
> By use of namespaces any number of ontologies can be used together, which
> enables sharing existing standard ontologies.  Only truly OEIS-oriented
> relationships would need to be modeled.
>
> This work seems like it could qualify as fundable research that would
> produce a valuable public resource.
>
>
>
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>
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>



-- 
Dear Friends, I will soon be retiring from AT&T. New coordinates:

Neil J. A. Sloane, President, OEIS Foundation
11 South Adelaide Avenue, Highland Park, NJ 08904, USA
Phone: 732 828 6098; home page: http://NeilSloane.com
Email: njasloane at gmail.com