Thursday, August 02, 2012

Google Knowledge Graph using data from BBC and Wikipedia

Google's Knowledge Graph can enhance search results by display some structured information about a hit in your list of results. It's available in the US (i.e., you need to use www.google.com, although I have seen it occasionally appear for google.co.uk.

Fruitbat
Here is what Google displays for Eidolon helvum (the straw-coloured fruit bat). You get a snippet of text from Wikipedia, and also a map from the BBC Nature Wildlife site. Wikipedia is a well-known source of structured data (in that you can mine the infoboxes for information). The BBC site has some embedded RDFa and structured HTML, and you can also get RDF (just append ".rdf" to the URL, i.e., http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/Straw-coloured_Fruit_Bat.rdf). There doesn't seem to be anything in the RDF about the distribution map, so presumably Google are extracting that information from the HTML.

It would be interesting to think about what other biodiversity data providers, such as GBIF and EOL could do to get their data incorporated into Google's Knowledge Graph, and eventually into these search result snippets.