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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).

Ben
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Sander Smith
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  • Possible duplicate: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/627594/is-there-a-wikipedia-api – rzetterberg May 03 '11 at 16:06
  • @Ancide: this is a somewhat different question, as the OP wants to do a kind of entity classification using Wikipedia. – Fred Foo May 03 '11 at 16:08
  • @larsmans Yeah, my brain's textparsing algorithm is too forgiving. It just read the tags and the only question in the text; "Does anyone know of any publically available APIs to do such a thing?" Silly brain! :) – rzetterberg May 03 '11 at 16:11
  • did you ever find a good solution for this? I'm attempting to get similar data and could use some insight, thanks! – SelAromDotNet Feb 15 '13 at 02:14
  • A year later I know, but @Josh , did you ever come up with a solution? I also need something similar. – Joel Murphy Apr 28 '14 at 01:51
  • no solution here, I ended up getting the info I needed manually and saving it locally in a custom format. – SelAromDotNet May 03 '14 at 18:53

2 Answers2

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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.

Fred Foo
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Try the Wikipedia API:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Creating_a_bot#APIs%5Ffor%5Fbots

It appears there's also an API for IMDB: http://www.deanclatworthy.com/imdb/

bpeterson76
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