{"id":784,"date":"2015-10-09T18:30:59","date_gmt":"2015-10-09T16:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.insideout.io\/en\/?p=784"},"modified":"2015-10-09T18:30:59","modified_gmt":"2015-10-09T16:30:59","slug":"science-fiction-movies-on-the-linked-data-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.insideout.io\/en\/2015\/10\/09\/science-fiction-movies-on-the-linked-data-cloud\/","title":{"rendered":"Looking for…science fiction movies on the Linked Data Cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"

When working in technology, sometimes you find yourself day-dreaming about Artificial Intelligence, Space Ships, Aliens. The trip can be intensified by a legacy of Science Fiction movies, that inspire and give motivation to work harder on the actual project. The bad part about being a science fiction junkie is that you always search for new movies worth watching. Along the years you become pickier and pickier, it\u2019s never enough.<\/p>\n

After re-reading The Foundations Series by Isaac Asimov, you crave for more and have the urge to find available movies with a solid background in literature. That seems to be a good filter for quality:<\/p>\n

You want to watch all sci-fi movies inspired by books.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Before watching them of course you need to list them. There are many resources on the web to accomplish the task:<\/p>\n

1 \u2013 imdb<\/a>, rotten tomatoes<\/a>: they offer detailed information about the movie, e.g. what the movie is about, what are the actors, some reviews. There are interesting user curated lists that partially satisfy your requirements, for example a list of the best sci-fi movies from 2000 to now<\/a>. These websites are good resources to get started, but they don\u2019t offer a search for the details you care about.<\/p>\n

2 \u2013 individual blogs: you may be lucky if a search engine indexed an article that exactly replies to your questions. The web is huge and someone might have been so brave to do the research himself and so generous to put it online. Not always the case, and absolutely not reliable.<\/p>\n

3 \u2013 Linked Data Cloud: the web of data comes as a powerful resource to query the web at atomic detail. Both dbPedia and Wikidata, the LOD versions of Wikipedia, contain thousands of movies and plenty of details for each. Since the LOD cloud is a graph database hosted by the public web, you can freely ask very specific and domain crossing questions obtaining as a result pure, diamond data. Technically this is more challenging, some would say \u201cdeveloper only\u201d, but at InsideOut we are working to democratize this opportunity.<\/p>\n\n

From the title of the post you may already know what option we like most, so let\u2019s get into the \u201chow to\u201d.
\nWe need to send a query to the Wikidata public SPARQL endpoint. Let\u2019s start from a visual depiction of our query, expressing concepts (circles) and relation between them (arrows).<\/p>\n

\"movies_based_on_scifi\"<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s color in white what we want in output from the query and in blue what we already know.<\/p>\n

\"movies_based_on_scifi\"<\/p>\n

\u2013 Why is it necessary to specify that m<\/em> is a Movie?
\nWritings can inspire many things, for example a song or a political movement, but we only want Movies.<\/p>\n

\u2013 Why it is not specified also that w<\/em> is a Writing and p<\/em> is a Person?
\nMovies come out of both books, short stories and sometimes science essays. We want our movies to be inspired by something that was written, and this relation is implied by the “author” relation. The fact that p is a person is implied from the fact that only persons write science fiction (at least until year 2015).<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s reframe the picture in a set of triples (subject-predicate-object statements), the kind of language a graph database can understand. We call m <\/em>(movie), w <\/i>(writing) and p<\/em> (person) our incognitas, then we define the properties and relations they must match.<\/p>\n