API to retrieve info about famous people

api wikipedia wikipedia-api
Sander Smith picture Sander Smith · May 3, 2011 · Viewed 7.4k times · Source

I'm looking for some callable way to get information about famous people and celebrities. Given a string, I'd like to determine if it's the name of a famous person, and if so, if they're alive and perhaps what category they fall into (e.g. Actor, Musician, Athlete).

Does anyone know of any publicly available APIs to do such a thing? The best I can come up with is Wikipedia, but it's pretty problematic because much of the info must be parsed, and isn't in a reliable and predictable format.

I'd also like to be able to offer suggestions for possible names when the initial search turns up nothing (since the strings will be from people and may contain misspellings).

Answer

Fred Foo picture Fred Foo · May 3, 2011

Try DBpedia, the "preparsed" (RDF) version of Wikipedia. It can be queried using SPARQL. It includes much of the info in the English-language Wikipedia.

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