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

The post 2020 – Oh What a Challenging Year appeared first on DBpedia Association.

Come on, let’s do this.

Welcome to Vienna, Austria  – Semantics

More than 110 DBpedia enthusiasts joined our Community Meeting in Vienna, on September 10th, 2018. The event was again co-located with SEMANTiCS, a very successful collaboration. Lucky us, we got hold of two brilliant Keynote speakers, to open our meeting. Javier David Fernández García, Vienna University of Economics, opened the meeting with his keynote Linked Open Data cloud – act now before it’s too late. He reflected on challenges towards arriving at a truly machine-readable and decentralized Web of Data. Javier reviewed the current state of affairs, highlighted key technical and non-technical challenges, and outlined potential solution strategies. The second keynote speaker was Mathieu d’Aquin, Professor of Informatics at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at NUI Galway. Mathieu, who is specialized in data analytics, completed the meeting with his keynote Dealing with Open-Domain Data.

The 12th edition of the DBpedia Community Meeting also covered a special chapter session, chaired by Enno Meijers, from the Dutch DBpedia Language Chapter. The speakers presented the latest technical or organizational developments of their respective chapter. This session has mainly created an exchange platform for the different DBpedia chapters. For the first time, representatives of the European chapters discussed problems and challenges of DBpedia from their point of view. Furthermore, tools, applications, and projects were presented by each chapter’s representative.

In case you missed the event, a more detailed article can be found here. All slides and presentations are also available on our Website. Further insights, feedback, and photos about the event are available on Twitter via #DBpediaDay.

Welcome to Mountain View  – GSoC mentor summit

GSoC was a vital part of DBpedia’s endeavors in 2018. We had three very talented students that with the help of our great mentors made it to the finish line of the program. You can read about their projects and success story in a dedicated post here.

After a successful 3-month mentoring, two of our mentors had the opportunity to attend the annual Google Summer of Code mentor summit. Mariano Rico and Thiago Galery represented DBpedia at the event this year. They engaged in a vital discussion about this years program, about lessons learned, highlights and drawbacks they experienced during the summer. A special focus was put on how to engage potential GSoC students as early as possible to get as much commitment as possible. The ideas the two mentors brought back in their suitcases will help to improve DBpedia’s part of the program for 2019. And apparently, chocolate was a very big thing there ;).

In case you have a project idea for GSoC2019 or want to mentor a DBpedia project next year, just drop us a line via dbpedia@infai.org. Also, as we intend to participate in the upcoming edition, please spread the word amongst students, and especially female students,  that fancy spending their summer coding on a DBpedia project. Thank you.

Welcome to London, England – Connected Data London 2018

In early November, we were invited to Connected Data London again. After 2017 this great event seems to become a regular in our DBpedia schedule.

Executive Director of the DBpedia Association, Sebastian Hellmannparticipated as panel candidate in the discussion around “Building Knowledge Graphs in the Real World”. Together with speakers from Thomson Reuters, Zalando, and Textkernel, he discussed definitions of KG, best practices of how to build and use knowledge graphs as well as the recent hype about it.

Visitors of CNDL2018 had the chance to grab a copy of our brand new flyer and exchange with us about the DBpedia Databus. This event gave us the opportunity to already met early adopters of our databus  – a decentralized data publication, integration, and subscription platform. Thank you very much for that opportunity.

A year went by

2018 has gone by so fast and brought so much for DBpedia. The DBpedia Association got the chance to meet more of DBpedia’s language chapters, we developed the DBpedia Databus to an extent that it can finally be launched in spring 2019. DBpedia is a community project relying on people and with the DBpedia Databus, we create a platform that allows publishing and provides a networked data economy around it. So stay tuned for exciting news coming up next year. Until then we like to thank all DBpedia enthusiasts around the world for their research with DBpedia, and support and contributions to DBpedia. Kudos to you.

All that remains to say is have yourself a very merry Christmas and a dazzling New Year. May 2019 be peaceful, exciting and prosperous.

Yours – being in a cheerful and festive mood –

DBpedia Association

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