Student Projects Announced

Yesterday Google finally announced who is selected as a GSoC student for this year. Accepted students are now paired with a mentor and start planning their projects and milestones. 

GSoC Community Bonding

It’s now time to spend a month learning more about the community of DBpedia. From the 17th of May to the 7th of June, the Community Bonding is taking place before coding starts on the 7th of June. To get in touch with your mentors and everyone else from the DBpedia Community, you have plenty of options:

• First of all, you can chat with other DBpedians on Slack, where you are able to join DBpedia developers discussion and technical discussions. 
• But not only that, you also can join our DBpedia-discussion-mailinglist, where we discuss current DBpedia developments. 
• To increase your visibility in the DBpedia Community, try to answer some questions in the DBpedia forum (especially in the unanswered & support category) and browse the topics. 
• Last but not least, check out our Github repository for open issues and see if you can help to solve them (e.g issues regarding the extraction framework or mappings).

When you share something about your project on your own blog or github, please inform us and your mentors. Thus, we can share it with the community and show your work results.

In case you still have questions, please do not hesitate to contact us via dbpedia@infai.org.

Stay safe and check Twitter or LinkedIn. Furthermore, you can subscribe to our newsletter for the latest news and information around DBpedia.

We wish you all the best!

Emma

on behalf of the DBpedia Association

The post GSoC Bonding Period 2021 – DBpedia appeared first on DBpedia Association.

In the upcoming Blog-Series, we like to take you on a retrospective tour through 2020, giving you insights into a year with DBpedia. We will highlight our past events and the development around the DBpedia dataset. 

A year with DBpedia and the DBpedia dataset – Retrospective Part 1

DBpedia Workshop colocated with LDAC2020

On June 19, 2020 we organized a DBpedia workshop co-located with the LDAC workshop series to exchange knowledge regarding new technologies and innovations in the fields of Linked Data and Semantic Web. Dimitris Kontokostas (diffbot, US) opened the meeting with his delightful keynote presentation ‘{RDF} Data quality assessment – connecting the pieces’. His presentation focused on defining data quality and identification of data quality issues. Following Dimitri’s keynote many community based presentations were held, enabling an exciting workshop day. 

Most Influential Scholars

DBpedia has become a high-impact, high-visibility project because of our foundation in excellent Knowledge Engineering as the pivot point between scientific methods, innovation and industrial-grade output. The drivers behind DBpedia are 6 out of the TOP 10 Most Influential Scholars in Knowledge Engineering and the C-level executives of our members. Check all details here: https://www.aminer.cn/ai2000/country/Germany 

DBpedia (dataset) and Google Summer of Code 2020

For the 9th year in a row, we were part of this incredible journey of young ambitious developers who joined us as an open source organization to work on a GSoC coding project all summer. With 45 project proposals, this GSoC edition marked a new record for DBpedia. Even though Covid-19 changed a lot in the world, it couldn’t shake GSoC. If you want to have deeper insights in our GSoC student’s work you can find their blogs and repos here: https://blog.dbpedia.org/2020/10/12/gsoc2020-recap/. 

DBpedia Tutorial Series 2020

During this year we organized three amazing tutorials in which more than 120 DBpedians took part. Over the last year, the DBpedia core team has consolidated a great amount of technology around DBpedia. These tutorials are target to developers (in particular of DBpedia Chapters) that wish to learn how to replicate local infrastructure such as loading and hosting an own SPARQL endpoint. A core focus was the new DBpedia Stack, which contains several dockerized applications that are automatically loading data from the DBpedia Databus. We will continue organizing more tutorials in 2021. Looking forward to meeting you online! In case you miss the DBpedia Tutorial series 2020, watch all videos here. 

In our upcoming Blog-Post after the holidays we will give you more insights in past events and technical achievements. We are now looking forward to the year 2021. The DBpedia team plans to have meetings at the Knowledge Graph Conference, the LDK conference in Zaragoza, Spain and the SEMANTiCS conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands. We wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year. In the meantime, stay tuned and visit our Twitter channel or subscribe to our DBpedia Newsletter.   

Yours DBpedia Association

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Oh, what a year! For the 9th year in a row, we were part of this incredible journey of young ambitious developers who joined us as an open source organization to work on a GSoC coding project all summer. 

Each year has brought us new project ideas, many amazing students and mostly great project results that shaped the future of DBpedia. 

Even though Covid-19 changed a lot in the world, it couldn’t shake GSoC much. The program, designed to mentor youngsters from afar is almost too perfect for the current world situation. One of the advantages of Google Summer of Code is, especially in times like these, the chance to work on projects remotely, but still obtain a first deep dive into Open Source projects like us – DBpedia. 

Meet the students and their projects

This year, we had notably more applications than in the previous ones. With 45 project proposals, this GSoC edition marked a new record for DBpedia. Throughout the summer program, our seven finalists worked intensely on their challenging DBpedia projects with great outcomes to show to the public. Projects ranged from extending our DBpedia extraction framework to a DBpedia Database project as well as to an online tool to generate RDF from DBpedia abstracts. If you want to have deeper insights into our GSoC student’s work you can find their blogs and repos in the following list. Check them out! 

• RDF-to-text using Generative Adversarial Networks 5
• A Multilingual RDF Verbalizer 4
• Dashboard for Language/National Knowledge Graphs 5
• Extending Extraction Framework with Citations, Commons and Lexeme Extractors 6
• Online Tool to generate RDF from DBpedia abstracts 5
• A Neural QA Model for DBpedia – Compositionality 3
• DBpedia Neural Multilingual QA 4
• Combine DBpedia/Databus with IPFS 3

Thanks to all our mentors around the world for joining us in this endeavour, for mentoring with kindness and technical expertise. A huge shout out to those who have been by our side for so many years in a row. Many thanks to Tommaso Soru, Beyza Yaman, Diego Moussalem, Edgard Marx, Mariano Rico, Thiago Castro Ferreira, Luca Virgili as well as Sebastian Hellmann, Stuart Chan, Amandeep Srivastava, Julio Hernandez and Jan Forberg. 

Mentor Summit

During the previous years you might have noticed that we always organized a little lottery to decide which mentor or organization admin can join the annual GSoC mentor summit. As this year’s event will be held online, space is not limited to 300 something mentors but is open to all organization admins and mentors alike. The GSoC Virtual Mentor Summit takes place October 15- 16, 2020 and this year we hope all our mentors will find the time to join and exchange with fellow mentors from around dozens of open source projects. 

After GSoC is before the next GSoC

We can not wait for the 2021 edition. Likewise, if you are an ambitious student who is interested in open source development and working with DBpedia you are more than welcome to either contribute your own project idea or apply for project ideas we offer starting in early 2021.

In case you like to mentor a project do not hesitate to also get in touch with us via dbpedia@infai.org. 

Stay tuned, frequently check Twitter, LinkedIn or the DBpedia Forum to stay in touch and don’t miss your chance of becoming a crucial force in this endeavour as well as a vital member of the DBpedia community.

See you soon,

yours

DBpedia Association

The post GSoC 2020 recap appeared first on DBpedia Association.

And, this is exactly what we did. We had been accepted as one of 206 open source organizations to participate in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) again. More than 25 students followed our call for project ideas. In the end, we chose six amazing students and their project proposals to work with during summer 2019. 
In the following post, we will show you some insights into the project ideas and how they turned out. Additionally, we will shed some light onto our amazing team of mentors who devoted a lot of time and expertise in mentoring our students. 

Meet the students and their projects

A Neural QA Model for DBpedia by Anand Panchbhai

With booming amount of information being continuously added to the internet, organising the facts and serving this information to the users becomes a very difficult task. Currently, DBpedia hosts billions of data points and corresponding relations in the RDF format. Accessing data on DBpedia via a SPARQL query is difficult for amateur users, who do not know how to write a query. This project tried to make this humongous linked data available to a larger user base in their natural languages (now restricted to English). The primary objective of the project was to translate natural language questions to a valid SPARQL query. Click here if you want to check his final code.

Multilingual Neural RDF Verbalizer for DBpedia by Dwaraknath Gnaneshwar

Presently, the generation of Natural Language from RDF data has gained substantial attention and has also been proven to support the creation of Natural Language Generation benchmarks. However, most models are aimed at generating coherent sentences in English, while other languages have enjoyed comparatively less attention from researchers. RDF data is usually in the form of triples, <subject, predicate, object>. Subject denotes the resource, the predicate denotes traits or aspects of the resource and expresses the relationship between subject and object. In this project, we aimed to create a multilingual Neural Verbalizer, ie, generating high-quality natural-language text from sets of RDF triples in multiple languages using one stand-alone, end-to-end trainable model. You can follow up on the progress and outcome of the project here. 

Predicate Detection using Word Embeddings for Question Answering over Linked Data by Yajing Bian

Knowledge-based question-answering system (KBQA) has demonstrated an ability to generate answers to natural language from information stored in a large-scale knowledge base. Generally, it completes the analysis challenge via three steps: identifying named entities, detecting predicates and generate SPARQL queries. In these three steps, predicate detection identifies the KB relation(s) a question refers to. To build a predicate detection structure, we identified all possible named entity first, then collected all predicates corresponding to the above entities. What follows is to calculate the similarity between problem and candidate predicates using a multi-granularity neural network model (MGNN). To find the globally optimal entity-predicate assignment, we use a joint model which is based on the result of entity linking and predicate detection process rather than considering the local predictions (i.e. most possible entity or predicate) as the final result. More details on the project are available here. 

A tool to generate RDF triples from DBpedia abstract by  Jayakrishna Sahit

The main aim of this project was to research and develop a tool in order to generate highly trustable RDF triples from DBpedia abstracts. In order to develop such a tool, we implemented algorithms which would take the output generated from the syntactic analyzer along with DBpedia spotlight’s named entity identifiers. Further information and the project’s results can be found here. 

A transformer of Attention Mechanism for Long-context QA by Stuart Chan

In this GSoC project, I choose to employ the language model of the transformer with an attention mechanism to automatically discover query templates for the neural question-answering knowledge-based model. The ultimate goal was to train the attention-based NSpM model on DBpedia with its evaluation against the QALD benchmark. Check here for more details on the project.

Workflow for linking External datasets by Jaydeep Chakraborty

The requirement of the project was to create a workflow for entity linking between DBpedia and external data sets. We aimed at an approach for ontology alignment through the use of an unsupervised mixed neural network. We explored reading and parsing the ontology and extracted all necessary information about concepts and instances. Additionally, we generated semantic vectors for each entity with different meta information like entity hierarchy, object property, data property, and restrictions and designed a User Interface based system which showed all necessary information about the workflow. Further info, download details and project results are available here. 

Meet our Mentors

First of all, a big shout out and thank you to all mentors and co-mentors who helped our students to succeed in their endeavours.

• Aman Mehta, former GSoC student and current junior mentor, recently interned as a software engineer at Facebook, London.
• Beyza Yaman, a senior mentor and organizational admin, Post-Doctoral Researcher based in ADAPT, Dublin City University, former Springer Nature-DBpedia intern and former research associate at the InfAI/University of Leipzig. She is responsible for the Turkish DBpedia and her field of interests are information retrieval, data extraction and integration over Linked Data.
• Tommaso Soru, senior mentor and organizational admin. I’m a Machine Learning & AI enthusiast, Data Scientist at Data Lens Ltd in London and a PhD candidate at the University of Leipzig. 

“DBpedia is my window to the world of semantic data, not only for its intuitive interface but also because its knowledge is organised in a simple and uncomplicated way”

Tommaso Soru, GSoC 2019

• Amandeep Srivastava, Junior Mentor and analyst at Goldman Sachs. He’s a huge fan of Christopher Nolan and likes to read fiction books in his free time.
• Diego Moussalem, Senior mentor, Senior Researcher at Paderborn University, an active and vital member of the Portuguese DBpedia Chapter. 
• Luca Virgili, currently a Computer Science PhD student at the Polytechnic University of Marche.He was a GSoC student for a year and a GSoC mentor for 2 years in DBpedia. 
• Bharat Suri, former GSOC student, Junior Mentor, Masters degree in Computer Science at The Ohio State University

“I have thoroughly enjoyed both my years of GSoC with DBpedia and I plan to stay and help out in whichever way I can”

Bharat Suri, GSoC 2019

• Mariano Rico, senior mentor,  Senior Doctor Researcher at Ontology Engineering Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.
• Nausheen Fatma, senior mentor, Data Scientist, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning at Info Edge (naukri.com).
• Ram G Athreya long-term GSoC mentor, Research Engineer at Viv Labs, Bay Area, San Francisco. 
• Ricardo Usbeck, team leader ‘Conversational AI and Knowledge Graphs’ at Fraunhofer IAIS.
• Rricha Jalota, former GSoC students, current senior mentor, developer in the Data Science Group at University of Paderborn, Germany 

“The reason why I love collaborating with DBpedia (apart from the fact that, it’s a powerhouse of knowledge-driven applications) is not only it gave me my first big break to the amazing field of NLP but also to the world of open-source!”

Rricha Jalota, GSoC 2019

In addition, we also like to thank the rest of our mentor team namely, Thiago Castro Ferreira, Aashay Singhal and Krishanu Konar, former GSoC student and current senior mentor, for their great work.  

Mentor Summit Recap 

This GSoC marked the 15th consecutive year of the program and was the 8th season in a row for DBpedia. As usual in each year we had two of our mentors, Rricha Jalota and Aashay Singhal joining the annual GSoC mentor summit. Selected mentors get the chance to meet each other and engage in a vital knowledge and expertise exchange around various GSoC related and non-related topics. Apart from more entertaining activities such as games, a scavenger hunt and a guided trip through Munich mentors also discussed pressing questions such as “why is it important to fail your students” or “how can we have our GSoC students stay and contribute for long”.

After GSoC is before the next GSoC

If you are interested in either mentoring a DBpedia GSoC project or if you want to contribute to a project of your own we are happy to have you on board. There are a few things to get you started.

• Have a look at previous DBpedia projects on GitHub
• Get in touch with old mentors and potential future mentors for example via our DBpedia Forum. We have a dedicated group for exchange about the upcoming season in 2020.

Likewise, if you are an ambitious student who is interested in open source development and working with DBpedia you are more than welcome to either contribute your own project idea or apply for project ideas we offer starting in early 2020.

Stay tuned, frequently check Twitter or the DBpedia Forum to stay in touch and don’t miss your chance of becoming a crucial force in this endeavour as well as a vital member of the DBpedia community.

See you soon,

yours

DBpedia Association

The post Better late than never – GSOC 2019 recap & outlook GSoC 2020 appeared first on DBpedia Association.

This year’s GSoC is slowly coming to an end with final evaluations already being submitted. In order to bridge the waiting time until final results are published, we like to draw your attention to a former project and great tool that was developed during last years’ GSoC.

Meet the DBpedia Chatbot. 

DBpedia Chatbot is a conversational Chatbot for DBpedia which is accessible through the following platforms:

1. A Web Interface
2. Slack
3. Facebook Messenger

Main Purpose

The bot is capable of responding to users in the form of simple short text messages or through more elaborate interactive messages. Users can communicate or respond to the bot through text and also through interactions (such as clicking on buttons/links). There are 4 main purposes for the bot. They are:

1. Answering factual questions
2. Answering questions related to DBpedia
3. Expose the research work being done in DBpedia as product features
4. Casual conversation/banter

Question Types

The bot tries to answer text-based questions of the following types:

Natural Language Questions

1. Give me the capital of Germany
2. Who is Obama?

Location Information

1. Where is the Eiffel Tower?
2. Where is France’s capital?

Service Checks

Users can ask the bot to check if vital DBpedia services are operational.

1. Is DBpedia down?
2. Is lookup online?

Language Chapters

Users can ask basic information about specific DBpedia local chapters.

1. DBpedia Arabic
2. German DBpedia

Templates

These are predominantly questions related to DBpedia for which the bot provides predefined templatized answers. Some examples include:

1. What is DBpedia?
2. How can I contribute?
3. Where can I find the mapping tool?

Banter

Messages which are casual in nature fall under this category. For example:

1. Hi
2. What is your name?

if you like to have a closer look at the internal processes and how the chatbot was developed, check out the DBpedia GitHub pages. 

DBpedia Chatbot was published on wiki.dbpedia.org and is one of many other projects and applications featuring DBpedia.

Powered by WPeMatico

In case you want your DBpedia based tool or demo to publish on our website just follow the link and submit your information, we will do the rest.

Yours

DBpedia Association

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During the 3 months summer break from university, students work on a programming projects  with an open source organization, like DBpedia. 

We are part of this exciting program for more than 5 years now. Many exciting projects developed as results of intense coding during hot summers. Presenting you Wouter Maroy, who has been a GSoC student at GSoc 2016 and who is currently a mentor in this years program, we like to give you a glimpse behind the scenes and show you how important the program is to DBpedia.

Success Story: Wouter Maroy

Who are you?

I’m Wouter Maroy, a 23 years old Master’s student in Computer Science Engineering at Ghent University (Belgium). I’m affiliated with IDLab – imec. Linked Data and Big Data technologies are my two favorite fields of interest. Besides my passion for Computer Science, I like to travel, explore and look for adventures. I’m a student who enjoys his student life in Ghent.  

What is your main interest in DBpedia and what was your motivation to apply for a DBpedia project at GSoC 2016.

I took courses during my Bachelors with lectures about Linked Data and the Semantic Web which of course included DBpedia; it’s an interesting research field. Before my GSoC 2016 application I did some work on Semantic Web technologies and on a technology (RML) that was required for a GSoC 2016 project that was listed by DBpedia. I wanted to get involved in Open Source and DBpedia, so I applied.

What did you do?

DBpedia has used a custom mapping language up until now to generate structured data from raw data from Wikipedia infoboxes. A next step was to improve this process to a more modular and generic approach that leads to higher quality linked data generation . This new approach relied on the integration of RML, the RDF Mapping Language and was the goal of the GSoC 2016 project I applied for. Understanding all the necessary details about the GSoC project required some effort and research before I started with coding. I also had to learn a new programming language (Scala). I had good assistance from my mentors so this turned out very well in the end.  DBpedia’s Extraction Framework, which is used for extracting structured data from Wikipedia, has a quite large codebase. It was the first project of this size I was involved in. I learned a lot from reading its codebase and from contributing by writing code during these months.

Dimitris Kontokostas and Anastasia Dimou were my two mentors. They guided me well throughout the project. I interacted daily with them through Slack and each week we had a conference call to discuss the project.  After many months of research, coding and discussing we managed to deliver a working prototype at the end of the project. The work we did was presented in Leipzig on the DBpedia day during SEMANTICS 16’. Additionally, this work will also be presented at ISWC 2017.

You can check out his project here.

How do you currently contribute to improve DBpedia?  

I’m mentoring a GSoC17 project together with Dimitris Kontokostas and Anastasia Dimou as a follow up on the work that was done by our GSoC 2016 project last year. Ismael Rodriguez is the new student who is participating in the project and he already delivered great work! Besides being a mentor for GSoC 2017, I make sure that the integration of RML into DBpedia is going into the right direction in general (managing, coding,…). For this reason, I worked at the KILT/DBpedia office in Leipzig during summer for 6 weeks. Joining and getting to know the team was a great experience.

What did you gain from the project?

Throughout the project I practiced coding, working in a team, … I learned more about DBpedia, RML, Linked Data and other related technologies. I’m glad I had the opportunity to learn this much from the project. I would recommend it to all students who are curious about DBpedia, who are eager to learn and who want to earn a stipend during summer through coding. You’ll learn a lot and you’ll have a good time!

Final words to future GSoC applicants for DBpedia projects.

Give it a shot! Really, it’s a lot of fun! Coding for DBpedia through GSoC is a great, unique experience and one who is enthusiastic about coding and the DBpedia project should definitely go for it.

Check our website for further updates, follow us on #twitter or subscribe to our newsletter.

Yours

DBpedia Association

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