The following post introduces to you ImageSnippets and how this tool profits from the use of DBpedia.

ImageSnippets – A Tool for Image Curation

For over two decades, ImageSnippets has been evolving as an ontology and data-driven framework for image annotation research. Representing the informal knowledge people have about the context and provenance of images as RDF/linked data is challenging, but it has also been an enlightening and engaging journey in not only applying formal semantic web theory to building image graphs but also to weave together our interests with what others have been doing in the field of semantic annotation and knowledge graph building over these many years. 

DBpedia provides the entities for our RDF descriptions

Since the beginning, we have always made use of DBpedia and other publicly available datasets to provide the entities for use in our RDF descriptions.  Though ImageSnippets can be used to build special vocabularies around niche domains, our primary research is around relation ontology building and we prefer to avoid the creation of new entities unless we absolutely can not find them through any other service.

When we first went live with our basic system in 2013, we began hand-building tens of thousands of triples using terms primarily from DBpedia (the core of the linked data cloud.) While there would often be an overlap of terms with other datasets – almost a case of too many choices – we formed a best practice of preferentially using DBpedia terms as often as possible, because they gave us the most utility for reasoning using the SKOS concepts built into the DBpedia service. We have also made extensive use of DBpedia Spotlight for named-entity extraction.

How to combine DBpedia & Wikidata and make it useful for ImageSnippets

But the addition of the Wikidata Query Service over the past 18 months or so has now given us an even more unique challenge: how to work with both! Since DBpedia and Wikidata both have class relationships that we can reason from, we found ourselves in a position to be able to examine both DBpedia and Wikidata in concert with each other through the use of mapping techniques between the two datasets.

How it works: ImageSnippets & DBpedia

When an image is saved, we build inference graphs over results from both DBpedia and Wikidata. These graphs can be revealed with simple SPARQL queries at our endpoint and queries from subclasses, taxons and SKOS concepts can find image results in our custom search tool.  We have also just recently added a pathfinder utility – highly useful for semantic explainability as it will return the precise path of connections from an originating source entity to the target entity that was used in our custom image search.

Sometimes a query will produce very unintuitive results, and the pathfinder tool enables us to quickly locate semantic errors which lead to clearly erroneous misclassifications (for example, a search for the Wikidata subclass of ‘communication medium’ reveals images of restaurants and hotels because of misclassifications in Wikidata.) In this way we can quickly troubleshoot the results of queries, using the images as visual cues to explore the accuracy of the semantic modelling in both datasets.

We are very excited with the new directions that we feel can come of our knitting together of the two knowledge graphs through the use of our visual interface and believe there is a great potential for ImageSnippets to serve a more complex role in cleaning and aligning the two datasets, using the images as our guides.

A big thank you to Margaret Warren for providing some insights into her work at ImageSnippets.

Yours,

DBpedia Association

The post ImageSnippets and DBpedia appeared first on DBpedia Association.

In part three of DBpedia’s growth hack blog series, we feature timbr, the latest development at DBpedia in collaboration with WPSemantix. Read on to find out how it works.

timbr – DBpedia SQL Semantic Knowledge Platform

Tel Aviv, Israel and Leipzig, Germany – July 18, 2019 – WP-Semantix (WPS) – the “SQL Knowledge Graph Company” and DBpedia Association – Institut für Angewandte Informatik e.V., announced today the launch of the timbr-DBpedia SQL Semantic Knowledge Platform, a unique version of WPS’ timbr SQL Semantic Knowledge Graph that integrates timbr-DBpedia ontology, timbr’s ontology explorer/visualizer and timbr’s SQL query service, to provide for the first time semantic access to DBpedia knowledge in SQL and to thus facilitate DBpedia knowledge integration into standard data warehouses and data lakes.

DBpedia

DBpedia is the crowd-sourced community effort to extract structured content from the information created in various Wikimedia projects and publish these as files on the Databus and via online databases. This structured information resembles an open knowledge graph which has been available for everyone on the Web for over a decade. Knowledge graphs are a new kind of databases developed to store knowledge in a machine-readable form, organized as connected, relationship-rich data. After the publication of DBpedia (in parallel to Freebase) 12 years ago, knowledge graphs have become very successful and Google uses a similar approach to create the knowledge cards displayed in search results.

Query the world’s knowledge in standard SQL

Amit Weitzner, founder and CEO at WPS commented: “Knowledge graphs use specialized languages, require resource-intensive, dedicated infrastructure and require costly ETL operations. That is, they did until timbr came along. timbr employs SQL – the most widely known database language, to eliminate the technological barriers to entry for using knowledge graphs and to implement Semantic Web principles to provide knowledge graph functionality in SQL. timbr enables modelling of data as connected, context-enriched concepts with inference and graph traversal capabilities while being queryable in standard SQL, to represent knowledge in data warehouses and data lakes. timbr-DBpedia is our first vertical application and we are very excited by the prospects of our cooperation with the DBpedia team to enable the largest user base to query the world’s knowledge in standard SQL.”

Sebastian Hellmann, executive director of the DBpedia Association commented that:

timbr will help to explore the power of semantic technologies

Prof. James Hendler, pioneer and a world-leading authority in Semantic Web technologies and WPS’ advisory board member commented “timbr can be a game-changing solution by enabling the semantic inference capabilities needed in many modelling applications to be done in SQL. This approach will enable many users to get the advantages of semantic AI technologies and data integration without the learning curve of many current systems. By giving more people access to the semantic version of Wikipedia, timbr-DBpedia will definitely contribute to allowing the majority of the market to explore the power of semantic technologies.”

timbr-DBpedia is available as a query service or licensed for use as SaaS or on-premises. See the DBpedia website: wiki.dbpedia.org/timbr.

About WPSemantix

WP-Semantix Ltd. (wpsemantix.com) is the developer of the timbr SQL semantic knowledge platform, a dynamic abstraction layer over relational and non-relational data, facilitating declaration and powerful exploration of semantically rich ontologies using a standard SQL query interface. timbr is natively accessible in Apache Spark, Python, R and SQL to empower data scientists to perform complex analytics and generate sophisticated ML algorithms.  Its JDBC interface provides seamless integration with the most popular business intelligence solutions to make complex analytics accessible to analysts and domain experts across the organization.

WP-Semantix, timbr, “SQL Knowledge Graph”, “SQL Semantic Knowledge Graph” and associated marks and trademarks are registered trademarks of WP Semantix Ltd.

DBpedia is looking forward to this cooperation. Follow us on Twitter for the latest information and stay tuned for part four of our growth hack series. The next post features the GlobalFactSyncRe. Curious? You have to be a little more patient and wait till Thursday, July 25th.

Yours DBpedia Association

The post timbr – the DBpedia SQL Semantic Knowledge Platform appeared first on DBpedia Association.