The SEMANTiCS Onsite Conference 2020 had to be postponed till September 2021. To bridge the gap until 2021, we took this opportunity to organize the Knowledge Graphs in Action (KGiA) online track as a SEMANTiCS satellite event on October 6, 2020. This new online conference is a combination of two existing events: the DBpedia Community Meeting and the annual Spatial Linked Data conference organised by EuroSDR and the Platform Linked Data Netherlands. We combined the best of both and as a bonus we added a track about Geo-information Integration organized by EuroSDR. As special joint sessions we presented four keynote speakers. 

First and foremost, we would like to thank the SEMANTiCS, EuroSDR and Platform Linked Data Netherlands for organizing the KGiA online event and many thanks to all chairs who supported the conference.

Following, we will give you a brief retrospective about the keynote presentations and talks.

Opening & Keynote #1

The Knowledge Graphs in Action conference was opened with a keynote presentation ‘Data Infrastructure for Energy System Models’ by Carsten Hoyer-Klick (German Aerospace Center). He presented LOD GEOSS, a project for the development of a distributed data infrastructure for the analysis of energy systems. The project is about the development of networked database concepts based on the ideas of linked open data and the semantic web for input and output data of energy system models in energy systems analysis. Afterwards the conference chairs offered three parallel sessions in the morning. 

Morning Sessions 

Session 1: Spatial Linked Data Country Update

In this session 7 speakers presented the uptake and latest progress of Spatial Linked Data adoption in European countries, either within national mapping agencies or beyond.

Session 2: VGI country presentations

There is an increasing use of crowdsourced geo-information (CGI) in spatial data applications by National Mapping and Cadastral Agencies (NMCAs). Applications range from using CGI for supporting the actualisation of spatial data to adding extra content, such as land use, building entrances, road barriers, sensors placed in the public space and many more. This session hosted five presentations from NMCAs showing the status of their CGI integration in mapping applications and processes.

Session 3: DBpedia Member presentations

Members of the DBpedia Association presented their latest tools, applications and technical developments in this session. Filipe Mesquita (Diffbot) opened the member session with his talk ‘Beyond Human Curation: How Diffbot Is Building A Knowledge Graph of the Web’. Also ImageSnippets, timbr.ai and GNOSS gave interesting and delightful talks about their technical developments. Vassil Momtchev from Ontotext closed the session by giving insights into the GraphDB 9.4.   

For further details of the presentations follow the links to the slides on the event page.

Afternoon Sessions 

Keynote #2

The afternoon sessions started with an interesting keynote by Peter Mooney (Maynooth University). He talked about the opportunities for a more integrated approach to Geo-information integration. 

After the second keynote Sebastian Hellmann, the CEO of the DBpedia Association, presented the development and methodology of the National Knowledge Graph for the Netherlands. In cooperation with Dutch partners, DBpedia invested two months to develop this new knowledge graph. His insightful presentation was followed by Benedicte Bucher (University Gustave Eiffel) talking about ‘Knowledge Graph on spatial digital assets in European’. She also presented the EuroSDR LDG initiative in many details.      

Afternoon Parallel Sessions

Session 4: Transforming Linked Data into a networked data economy – DBpedia Chapter Session

In the DBpedia Chapter Session, members of different European DBpedia chapters gave an overview about the data landscape in their countries. They presented identified business opportunities and important challenges, such as automated clearance of licenses in their countries. Enno Meijers (National Library of the Netherlands) summarized the data landscape in the Netherlands. There were also presentations about the data landscape in Brazil, Spain, Austria and Poland.   

Session 5: EuroSDR VGI data wrangling

This session intends to uncover new combinations and integration of CGI data with data from NMCAs which demonstrate the added value for map creation and map usage. Data wrangling (the process of creating small reproducible data processing workflows) is deployed for this work by using and combining existing geospatial software (desktop, web and mobile). In this session the results of the data wrangling process were presented. 

Session 6: Spatial Session

In this session, two speakers presented how they built knowledge graphs, and in the second part three presenters gave insights into tooling and presented the state of the art on working with Linked Data.

For further details of the presentations follow the links to the slides on the event page.

Keynote #3 and #4

Keynote #3 ‘Spatial Knowledge in Action – Deep semantics, geospatial thinking, and new cartographies’ was given by Marinos Kavouras (National Technical University of Athens). Marinos stated that the power of maps and modern cartographic language proves to have a new role for society at large, as an indispensable communication and cognitive tool. The KG in Action conference ended with the keynote presentation ‘Know, Know Where, KnowWhereGraph’ by Krzysztof Janowicz (University of California). During his live talk from California, Krzysztof provided an overview of ideas and hopes for creating geo-specific knowledge graphs and geo-enrichment services on top of this graph to address some of the aforementioned challenges.

In case you missed the event, all slides and presentations are also available on the DBpeda website. We will upload all recordings on the DBpedia youtube channel. Further insights, feedback and photos about the event are available on Twitter (#KGiA hashtag).

We are now looking forward to 2021. We plan to have meetings at the Knowledge Graph Conference and the SEMANTiCS conference in Amsterdam. Stay safe and check Twitter, LinkedIn and our Website or subscribe to our Newsletter for the latest news and information.

Yours,

DBpedia Association

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Opening Session

During the opening session, Chris Welty, Google Researcher, presented Even the Changes Are Changing: A New Age of Cognitive Computing. He introduced the impact and challenges of question answering & AI as well as the development of Jeopardy through technical changes. Victor de Boer from the VU University talked about Semantic Technology for Development: Semantic Web without the Web?. He demonstrated the use of semantic technology in the challenging technical environment of developing countries. Both talks illustrated the ever growing importance of semantic technology and AI each placed at opposite sites of the technology spectrum, from Raspberry PIs to High Performance Clusters.

Showcase Session

The DBpedia Showcase Session started with an interactive interview. Sebastian Hellmann (AKSW/KILT) talked with Jan-Bart de Vreede (Kennisnet, former member of the Wikimedia Foundation) about the challenges of growing an open community and creating a more formal structure. They discussed advantages, pitfalls and what lessons can be learned from other communities such as Wikimedia. Afterwards Markus Freudenberg (AKSW/KILT) introduced the highlights of the 2016-10 DBpedia Release.

At this session, five speakers presented how to utilize DBpedia in novel and interesting ways. Including:

• Virtuoso 8 and Scalable Attributed-based Access Controls (ABAC) by Patrick van Kleef (Openlink Software)
• Learning to Associate DBpedia Entities like Humans by Joern Hees (DFKI) (demo)
• Towards Using UnifiedViews for Executing DBpedia Data Extraction and Curation Tasks by Tomas Knap (Semantic Web Company)
• Sustainable Linked Data Generation: The Case of DBpedia by Wouter Maroy (imec)
• Mappings UI by Ismael Rodríguez (Polytechnic University of Catalonia)

Parallel Session

As a regular part of the DBpedia Community Meeting, we had two parallel sessions in the afternoon where DBpedia newbies can learn about what DBpedia is and how to use the DBpedia datasets. Participants who wanted to learn DBpedia basics joined the tutorial session by Markus Freudenberg (DBpedia Release Manager). The DBpedia Association Hour provided a platform for the community to discuss the results of the DBpedia Strategy Survey 2017. This survey was prepared by Sören Auer and the DBpedia Board members to get to know what the DBpedia Community thinks about DBpedia’s strategic priorities and how the funds of the DBpedia Association should be spent. Even if 45 minutes were not adequate to review all survey questions, this session proved to be beneficial due to a really agile and dynamic discussion. A better cooperation and communication between the Association and the different national and language chapter is only one suitable key which was embraced by the community to facilitate problem solving and DBpedia’s organization.

Afternoon Track

The sessions in the afternoon highlighted two important fields of research and development, namely DBpedia Ontology and DBpedia & NLP. At the DBpedia Ontology Session, Gustavo Publio (AKSW/KILT) presented data quality issues in DBpedia and highlighted the challenges on redesign the DBpedia Ontology (slides).  Wouter Maroy (imec) and Ismael Rodríguez (Polytechnic University of Catalonia) showcased the DBpedia Mappings Front-End Administration, which they created during this year’s Google Summer of Code project. If you are interested in career opportunities at DBpedia, check out Wouter’s success story here.

At the same time, Milan Dojchinovski (AKSW/KILT) chaired the DBpedia & NLP session with five very interesting talks. In the following you will find all presentations given during this session:

• DBpedia Spotlight 1.0 – A new Release by Sandro Coelho (DBpedia Association) slides
• DBpedia NIF Abstracts Dataset by Markus Freudenberg (AKSW/KILT) slides
• TextExt intro – DBpedia Open Extraction Challenge by Sandro Coelho (DBpedia Association) slides
• TextExt winner – Lector: RDF Triples Extraction from Wikipedia Text by Matteo Cannaviccio, Roma Tre University slides
• Chaudron: Extending DBpedia with Measures by Julien Subercaze, Télécom Saint-Etienne & Université Jean Monnet slides

Dutch DBpedia Hour & Joint Workshop

Enno Meijers (National Library of the Netherlands) chaired the Dutch DBpedia Hour. In this open session members of the Dutch DBpedia Language Chapter discussed tasks and responsibilities for sustaining and developing the Dutch DBpedia as well as communication, technical infrastructure and content improvement of the DBpedia Dutch Language Chapter. The reference for this discussion was the tasks and responsibilities stated in the Memorandum of Understanding signed by Huygens ING, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, iMec and Beeld en Geluid. Outcome of this session was an agreement on the approach for creating an operational plan.

Simultaneously, DBpedia joint a session with the Workshop “Linked Data Quality Assessment and Improvement from Academia to Industry”. The presentations are available below:

• RDFUnit Presentation (Validation in DBpedia) by Dimitris Kontokostas (GeoPhy)
• ShEx Validation with Wikidata by Eric Prud’hommeaux & Andra Waagmeeste
• DBpedia Links Repository by Magnus Knuth & Amit Kirschenbaum (AKSW/KILT)

In the closing session, Sebastian Hellmann (AKSW/KILT) announced a new collaboration to strengthen the DBpedia NLP Department. Via videostream we talked with Mike Tung and Filipe Mesquita from diffbot, about NLP and the relation extraction from Wikipedia articles. If you are interested in the new collaboration, please check diffbot’s slides here.

All slides and presentations are also available on our Website and you will find more feedback and photos about the event on Twitter via #DBpediaAmsterdam17.

We would like to thank the DBpedia Dutch language chapter, especially Enno Meijers (National Library of the Netherlands), Lieke Verhelst (Linked Data Factory, Informagic), Victor de Boer (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Roland Cornelissen (metamatter), Gerald Wildenbeest (Saxion), Gerard Kuys (Ordina), Maarten Brinkerink (The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision) as well as Julia Holze (DBpedia Association), Dimitris Kontokostas (DBpedia Chapter Coordinator) and Sebastian Hellmann (AKSW/KILT, DBpedia Association) for devoting their time to curating the program and organizing the meeting.

Special thanks go to Katharina Weissenberg and Anna Keil for supporting the meeting by taking pictures of the community and the event.

We are now looking forward to the 11th DBpedia Community Meeting which will be held on 12th of October 2017 in Cupertino, California. Visit our event page for further updates.

So, stay tuned and check Twitter, Facebook and the Website or subscribe to our Newsletter for latest news and updates.

See you soon!

Yours,

DBpedia Association

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Hereby we proudly announce that DBpedia in Dutch is the first chapter which signed the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). There are various intentions why they already signed the MoU: First of all they support the goals of the DBpedia Association, secondly they strengthen their own chapter and community of contributors and thirdly they improve the cooperation with the Dutch research infrastructure and the Dutch Digital Heritage. The cooperation was initiated by Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands) and Huygens ING (research institute of History and Culture).

Other partners like imec/Ghent University and Institute of Sound and Vision have signed as well and became an executive partner of the DBpedia Association. The Vrije Universiteit will join soon. It is a cooperation between these Dutch organizations as well as the NL-DBpedia community.

The Dutch Chapter has provided a Sample DBpedia Chapter Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to use as a template for further chapters. If you use DBpedia and want us to keep going forward, we kindly invite you to donate and help DBpedia to grow. If you would like to become a member of the DBpedia Association, please go directly to the application form or contact us.

Check our website for further updates, stay tuned and follow us on Twitter.

Your DBpedia Association

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We thought it was about time to go orange again, meet the Dutch DBpedia Chapter and to meet and celebrate the growing dutch DBpedia community. Thus, following our successful US-event past November, the National Library of the Netherlands hosted the 6th DBpedia community meeting in The Hague on February 12th. 

First and foremost, we would like to thank TNO for organizing the pre-event and the National Library of the Netherlands, especially Menno Rasch (Director of KB operations), for sponsoring the catering during the DBpedia community meeting.

Pre-event

Before diving into DBpedia topics, we had a welcome reception on February 11th with snacks and drinks at TNO – New Babylon.  Around 40 people from the DBpedia community, members from TNO and its Data Science Department and representatives from the Platform Linked Data Netherlands engaged in vital exchanges about Linked Data topics in the Netherlands.

Sebastian Hellmann gave a short introduction about DBpedia and the recently found DBpedia Association. After Jean-Louis Roso talked about the TNO Data Science Department and current developments and projects, Erwin Folmer presented the platform Linked Data Netherlands (PiLOD).

A poster and demo session right after gave people from TNO the opportunity to present and discuss projects currently carried out at TNO.

Following, you find a short list of poster-presentation during the pre-event:

• The Smart Appliances REFerence ontology (SAREF)Standardization in IoT
• Linked Data in Horticulture
• GOOSE: Semantic search in Image Retrieval
• Logistics: Ontologies for the Physical Internet
• SWELL: Smart Reasoning for Well Being

The following social gathering with snacks and drinks, encouraged talks about current developments in the DBpedia community and about ongoing projects. According to TNO representative Laura Daniel, the pre-event was very successful. She summarized the evening of the welcome reception: “It was very inspiring to see the DBpedia community in action. There were lots of interesting projects that use DBpedia as well as lively discussions on the challenges faced by the community, and of course, the event was a great opportunity for networking!”

Main event

Opening Session

Following the pre-event, the main event attracted 95 participants and featured special session dedicated to the DBpedia showcases, the DBpedia ontology and challenges of DBpedia and Digital Heritage.

During the opening session, Menno Rasch, host of the meeting and Director of KB operations, highlighted the importance to raise awareness of the DBpedia brand in order to build a DBpedia community.

The newly found DBpedia Association and the related new charter regulating organizational issues in the DBpedia community was one of the focuses during the early morning hours, right before several interesting keynote presentations opened the discussion about DBpedia and its usage in the Netherlands.

Marco de Niet, representative of Digital Heritage Foundation (DEN Foundation), the Dutch knowledge centre for digital heritage, talked about “the National Strategy for Digital Heritage in the Netherlands”.

Marco Brattinga and Arjen Santema from the Land Registry and Mapping Agency (Kadaster) presented a framework to describe the data and metadata in registration in relation to a concept schema that describes what the registration is about. Apart from the ideas behind the framework, their presentation included a showcase of examples from the cadastral registration as well as the topographic map and the information node addresses and buildings.

The morning session was closes by Paul Groth, from Elsevier giving a presentation about knowledge graph construction and the Role of DBPedia and other Wikipedia based knowledge. He discussed  the importance of structured data as key to coordinate data in order to build better taxonomies. He also pointed towards the importance of having an updated publicly available knowledge graph as a reference for constructing internal knowledge graphs.

After Lunch Track

DBpedia is one of the biggest and most important focal point of the Linked Open Data movement. Thus, the after-lunch-track focused very much on DBpedia Usages during the dedicated showcase session, which started with the new DBpedia & DBpedia+ Data Stack  release (planned for  2016-04).

Afterwards, the session continued with further DBpedia related discussions, in which various practical DBpedia matters such as DBpedia in the EUROPEANA Food and Drink project, the use of DBpedia for improved vaccine information systems or using Elasticsearch + DBpedia to maintain a searchable database of global power plants were tackled.

Afternoon Track

The afternoon track came along with four DBpedia highlight-sessions, namely DBpedia and Ontologies, DBpedia and Heritage, DBpedia hands-on development and DBpedia and NLP. Firstly, the DBpedia ontology group discussed possible ontology usages and presented the results of the latest DBpedia Ontology survey. In the following 75 minutes during the DBpedia and Heritage session, special challenges and opportunities of reference data for digital heritage were addressed by experts from EUROPEANA, iMinds, RCE and KB, the National Library of the Netherlands. Thirdly, members of the DBpedia Association and the AKSW/KILT group from Leipzig led a practical session for developers and DBpedia enthusiasts to talk about technical issues and challenges in DBpedia as well as they held a Tutorial session for DBpedia Newbies.

The end of the event was dedicated to NLP and the application of Linked Data on Language Technologies, especially entity linking, topics which are of vital importance for the research of AKSW/KILT members at the University of Leipzig.

Following, you find a list of all presentations given during the meeting.

• Sebastian Hellmann, DBpedia Association AKSW/KILT – Have you Backlinked your Data yet?
• Marco de Niet, DEN Foundation – Digital Heritage in the Netherlands
• Marco Brattinga and Arjen Santema, Land Registry and Mapping Agency (Kadaster) –  Keynote #1:
• Paul Groth, Elsevier –  Knowledge Graph Construction and the Role of DBPedia
• Antoine Isaac, Europeana – Enriching Cultural Heritage Data with DBpedia
• Patrik Schneider, Siemens and WU Wien – DBpedia Wayback Machine
• Richard Nagelmaeker, – BlueSky – Knowledge Diviner – DBpedia demo 
• Laura Daniele, TNO – GOOSE
• Christina Unger, CITEC – DBlexipedia: A nucleus for a multilingual lexical Semantic Web
• Raphael Boyer, DBpedia FR / INRIA – DBpedia Historic data
• Chris Davis – Using Elasticsearch + DBpedia to maintain a searchable database of global power plants
• Ali Khalili – Linked Data Reactor
• Vladimir Alexiev, Ontotext –  Using DBPedia in Europeana Food and Drink
• Nilesh Chakraborty, AKSW/KILT – FREME  – Open Framework of e-Services for Multilingual and Semantic Enrichment of Digital Content.
• Monika Solanki,University of Oxford – Using DBpedia for improved Vaccine Information Systems
• Ralph Schäfermeier and Alexandru Todor, FU Berlin – WebProtégé demo & aspect oriented programming
• Gerard Kuys / Ordina – Classification Ontology
• Vladimir Alexiev / Ontotext – DBpedia mappings quality problems
• Enno Meijers, Dutch DBpedia – DBpedia & Heritage: Challenges and opportunities of reference data for digital heritage
• Hugo Manguinhas, Europeana – Building an ecosystem of networked references
• Anastasia Dimou, iMinds – RML – generating high quality Linked Data
• Joop Vanderheiden, RCE – Histograph: geocoding places of the pas
• Olaf Janssen,KB – Illegal newspapers in the WOII” Wikipedia/DBpedia project
• Christina Unger, CITEC  – Towards a Linguistic Linked Data Ecosystem (Results of the LIDER project)
• Giuseppe Futia: TellMeFirst – TellMeFirst ­ A Knowledge Domain Discovery Framework
• Chris Davis – Mapping the Bio-economy using DBpedia Spotlight

All slides and presentations are also available on our Website and you will find more feedback and photos about the event on Twitter via #DBpediaDenHaag.

Summing up, the 6th community meeting brought together more than 95 DBpedia enthusiast from the Netherlands and Europe which engaged in vital conversations about interesting projects and approaches to questions/problems revolving around DBpedia, not only during the dedicated session but also during networking breaks. The recently found DBpedia Association was strongly represented with presentations from Sebastian Hellmann, Dimitris Kontokostas,  Nilesh Chakraborty, as well as Markus Freudenberg.

Finally, we would like to thank the organizers Enno Meijers, Richard Nagelmaker, Gerald Wildenbeest, Gerard Kuys, Monika Solanki and representatives of the DBpedia Association such as Dimitris Kontokostas and Sebastian Hellmann for devoting their time to the organization of the meeting and the programme. We are now looking forward to the 7th DBpedia Community Meeting, which will be held in the city of Leipzig again, during the Semantics conference in September 15th, 2016.

For updates, just follow us on Facebook, Twitter or check the following websites: http://www.semantics.cc/ and http://wiki.dbpedia.org/.

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