Forum/API

Suggestions for the api

gooseware September 17, 2008

I was having a look through your api functions and I was thinking that there are a couple of things missing....

1) adding to the knowledge base

2) querying the available objects to see if you can add to it

.......

There is probably more to add but at the moment thats what I have. It is all very good to give us access to query the server with the api ... but without the ability to add to the knowledge base with our own I don't think the api would reach its true potential. One of the problems I believe you would face in building a knowledge base is having to create transforms for the sources of information already out there .... e.g. wikipedia .... Although that is a good thing it would also be good to create a way for the community to add their information to the TK base as it gets added .... for example if I was mysql I would want to support my community by extending search with NLP I would add mysql related objects to TK. The best way to do this would be to provide mysql with an api where they could add objects etc which are related to their product. The benefits to TK would be twofold ...

1) Growing your knowledge base as you would have a larger number of contributors

2) Gaining market share in the number of companies and communities which would use your search on their site.

if your api provides enhanced error information like ... "mysql does not exist .... could you please categorize it for me " add this to a review process which could be accessible through the api and the worldwide community would be able to help build rich datasets with greater ease.

Anyways ... long story short .... only having an api which lets you access the data and not contribute limits the value of the api both to TK and the end user.

I will continue to look for ideas to add to the api...

 

Comments

User photo
beth
Thanks for that suggestion.

I'll pass it on but it would be quite a non-trivial change. If you try adding an object or a class through the front end you'll see the amount of information that needs to be collected in order to add new objects to the data.

September 17, 2008 06:59.
User photo
gooseware
If you take the google translate API as an example .... my database stores the google translation and my site has a large number of multilingual contributors who change the translated stubs into proper translations. I could utilize this community to help build googles translation accuracy by sending corrections as well as diffs and ratings to google (all data that I capture for future use). This is something that they do in their translate page front end ... but they do not have that facility in their api. It is something that is trivial to add and as a developer of applications I would like to contribute to the power of the api's I am using because at the end of the day that helps my end users. I may be interested in adding NLP search to my backend but do not have the time, resources or established community to make my own powerful tool. At the same time your service might not have objects that are related to my particular field. Rather than having to go to your frontend in order to add objects I might like to use Ubiquity or have some intelligence in my backend to acertain how the user could contribute to TK's knowledge, I would be interested in keeping a track of a users contribution score so that I could weigh their contributions before sending it to TK. (perhaps having a contributor uid sent to the api could help with the signal:noise >>>)

Anyways I wouldn't mind talking about this in a little more detail with someone if anyone were interested.

September 17, 2008 07:53.
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nickf
True Knowledge Ltd
[quote:e36aefd973="gooseware"]Anyways I wouldn't mind talking about this in a little more detail with someone if anyone were interested.[/quote:e36aefd973]

Sounds interesting, would you be able to break down exactly what you are proposing in a few words, my head is spinning a little after reading your post :oops:

October 07, 2008 14:46.