Search

repairing a broken dbpedia application - Rock Groups Albums - but lost the covers :-(

The second broken dbpedia application used to show the albums for a selected Rock artist or Group as an HTML table and a Simile Timeline.  This application was REALLY broken!

  • the scripts had been moved on the server by the administrator in an attempt to solve a recurrent eXist failure
  • the meaning of the category "Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees" changed so that some artists dropped of the list
  • the dbpedia vocabularies changed - for instance releaseDate was http://dbpedia.org/property/released but is now http://dbpedia.org/ontology/releaseDate
  • identification of which works are albums changed - a skos category was used but has been functionally replaced by an rdf:type of http://dbpedia.org/ontology/Album

But the killer for the application is that http://dbpedia.org/property/cover used to be  the full URI to the cover image in Wikipedia, but is now just the file name, eg. Pepper's.jpg  Since the image files have URIs like http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/67/Pepper%27s.jpg, it is not possible to reconstruct the image URI. 

The application is much the poorer with the lost of visual appeal of the album cover but it is working again

Rock and Roll albums