[Developers] Results from the reconciliation service?

[Tom Morris]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 4:28 PM, Tom Morris <tfmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks for the tips and the pointers.  I'll have a play with the new
> reconciliation service and see if it's better.

OK, today I had a few minutes to play with the new service a little.
I had what I thought would be a pretty simple task -- resolve a list
of country names, as expressed by the international standards group
ITU-T, against Freebase so that I could add their country codes from
the E.164 standard for the telephone dialing plan.

I tried two variations: 1) just names (plus type of course)  and 2)
names and country codes (for the few that have them).  In the second
case it failed to resolve 200+ of 231 and in the first it failed to
resolve any (although it called three with the id of None successful
resolutions).

I switched from the app to the service to see if I could figure out
what was going on and try to improve it.  Using the service debug page
at http://mqlx.com/reconciliation/?help with the query

{'/type/object/name' : 'Afghanistan',
'/type/object/type' : '/location/country'
}

I got back the following result

[ { "id": "/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000000418c",
    "name": "Afghanistan",
    "score": 0.6429737,
    "match": false
 }]

In other words, a single exact name match with no alternatives, but
the "match" property set to false.  Apparently the application works
solely off of is the match property, in determining whether or not
something was successfully resolved.

Is there a way improve things?  For instance, is there a way to set
the threshold score that's considered a match?  Or perhaps a way to
get the reconciliation service to consider an exact name and type
match to be a better match?

Tom