DBPedia: What's the meaning of '__1' (double underscores) in URIs?

Question

On DBPedia you can find a lot of URIs that containing double underscores and a number at the end, eg.:

• http://dbpedia.org/resource/Eric_Cheney__1
• http://dbpedia.org/resource/Eli_Wallach__1
• http://dbpedia.org/resource/Ed_Wood__1
• http://dbpedia.org/resource/Francis_Ford_Coppola__1

Mostly these items are of the type PersonFunction, but I can't find any documentation on why these objects exist (and a person's function isn't an ObjectProperty?)...

So why are these created?

Answer 1

After reading this DBPedia discussion on blank nodes storing, it seems the purpose is to avoid clashing with WikiPedia's URIs.

This, presumably, is used for nodes that don't have a corresponding article on WikiPedia, but rather points to a close article on the subject. As DBPedia tries to create a URI for everything, this URI is assembled according to specific rules (more on this can be found at the above linked discussion).

From the discussion:

Note that intermediate node URIs always contain double underscores, e.g. 1. Wikipedia doesn't allow consecutive underscores in page titles, so we can be sure that these URIs will not clash with DBpedia URIs for Wikipedia pages. We pick a name from the arguments of the template from which the intermediate node is extracted, append two underscores, that name and a number to the URI of the main page and use that as the URI for the intermediate node. If there are multiple intermediate nodes on one page for which we pick the same name, we use different numbers, e.g. see 1 and [2].