Adding DBPedia

[Mysterium-Mystery]

Place names are only recognized when switching to the names dictionary and even then, not all places are represented and there's no description of where a place is. This makes reading place names very annoying.

Of course I'm aware that this is a limitation of jmnedict, which is used as a source for these, but many cases could be fixed by including DBPedia in here, just as Jisho does. An example of this is for example: https://jisho.org/word/51864306d5dda7bda805a14e
As you can see it has a second meaning that clearly describes the place which seems to come from DBPedia. So adding that to the regular lookup would improve reading place names a lot, I think

[melink14]

Thanks for the idea. In the first place, making common proper nouns appear normally is a good idea and more over using better place descriptions sounds good!

There would be some issues to solve of course. For example, I assume some place names may have multiple entries in the DBPedia and we'd need to decide if we choose just one or list all of them.

The real tricky issue is adding the actual data to rikaikun since it's a bit more constrained than jisho.org it's not as easy to just pull in data. It seems to either expect an online lookup to their API server or I assume we can somehow download their SQL database.

I'd say it would probably be awhile before this gets done given the complexity but it seems worth doing!

[melink14]

Ah, I see now that https://ja.dbpedia.org/# is just a mirror of wikipedia so it's bound to have lots of entries that aren't relevant.

I guess the best way to add it is to actually do an offline processing step where we go through all the names and do a query to see if there's an entry and then add it as a definition to the built in rikaikun dictionary.

The increase in size would be quite large though given it has to be downloaded into everybody's browser...