We've got a huge new class of questions working this week - superlatives and rankings! This gets thousands of new questions working for us. A few examples are
- "What is the tallest mountain in the world?"
- "Who was the 27th US president?"
- "Which beer has the greatest alcohol content?"
- "What is the third richest US state?
All these questions work in the same way. They take a class of objects, such as [mountain], and consider it as an ordered list using a relation, such as [is the height of] and a direction (increasing or decreasing). Then they return the object which is at the correct position in the list. This is either a 'superlative' object (one at the top or bottom of the list) or a 'ranked' one (with a position specified with a number).
The wording of the question tells us which relation to use for ordering the list. We know that "tallest" and "richest" always refer to heights and amounts of money, and also that they're talking about the highest values, so the list goes in decreasing order starting from the top. In the beer question, the word "greatest" tells us to use a decreasing list and the words "alcohol content" tell us which property to order by. The president question is a little different. The ordering isn't specified explicity but the system stores a fact stating that the conventional ordering for US presidents is to list them in the order that they came to power.
You can see that the simple but powerful technique will work for any ordering on any class that you can think of, and these can be combined into longer questions too. Next week we'll be incorporating these elements as building blocks in longer queries, such as "Who is the president of the smallest republic in the world?" Watch this space to see how far we get.
The community have been working hard too this week. Here's the weekly stats:
- Chris (crittelmeyer) - 1028 facts
- Daniel (db48x) - 241 facts
- barrybounce - 154 facts
- ntraft - 142 facts
- Fernanda (ferdf) - 89 facts
We've started a "things to do" thread on the forum where users can recruit volunteers to their own projects, and it's been quite fruitful. Fernanda's started a project to get all the award nominees into the database, and I think they've got all the answers to "What was nominated for Best Picture in 19XX?" working already. Chris was looking for people to help out with academic majors and I wanted people to help get some objects classified. If any of those projects sound interesting or you've got an idea for one of your own then get yourself a beta account and come along to the forum!
Daniel got to work on the object classification. There's a lot to be done here as we've automatically generated so many new classes based on Wikipedia entries. They're a wonderful resource but their classification needs are quite different to ours, so it's terrific of Daniel to help fit the classes suggested by their pages into our structure. He's turning out to be quite an expert on ships.
Barrybounce is the highest new entry into our user chart. He's been adding trampoline-related facts, as you can guess from his username. Our other new entry, Ntraft, has added a couple of self-driving vehicles (a new category for us). He's put up a few images of them too - they look quite exciting!
