A growth hack – how come?

Things have gone a bit quiet around DBpedia. No new releases, no clear direction to go. Did DBpedia stop? Actually not. There were community and board member meetings, discussions, 500 messages per week on dbpedia.slack.com.

We are still there. We, as a community, restructured and now we are done, which means that DBpedia will now work more focused to build on its Technology Leadership role in the Web of Data and thus – with our very own DBpedia Growth Hack – bring new innovation and free fuel to everybody.

What is this growth hack?

We restructured in two areas:

1. The agility of knowledge delivery –  our release cycle was too slow and too expensive. We were unable to include substantial contributions from DBpedians. Therefore, quality and features stagnated.
2. Transparent processes – DBpedia has a crafty community with highly skilled knowledge engineers backing it. At some point, we grew too much and became lumpy, with a big monolithic system that nobody could improve because of side effects. So we designed a massive curation infrastructure where information can be retrieved, adjusted and errors discussed and fixed.

We have been consistently working on this restructuring for two years now and we now have the infrastructure ready as horizontal prototype meaning each part works and everybody can start using it. We ate our own dog food and built the first application.

(Frey et al. DBpedia FlexiFusion – Best of Wikipedia > Wikidata > Your Data (accepted at ISWC 2019) .

Now we will go through each part and polish & document it, and will report about it with a blog post each.  Stay tuned !

Is DBpedia Academic or Industrial?

The Semantic Web has a history of being labelled as too academic and a part of it colored DBpedia as well. Here is our personal truth: It is an engineering project and therefore it swings both ways. It is a great academic success with 25,000 papers using the data and  enabling research and innovation. The free data drives research on data-driven research. Also, we are probably THE fastest pathway from lab to market as our industry adoption has unprecedented speed. Proof will follow in the blog posts of the Growth Hack series.

Blog Posts of the Growth Hack series:

(not necessarily in that order, depending on how fast we can polish & document )

• Query DBpedia as SQL – a first service on the Databus
• DBpedia Live Extraction – Realtime updates of Wikipedia
• DBpedia Business Models – How to earn money with DBpedia & the Databus
• MARVIN Release Bot – together with https://blogs.tib.eu/wp/tib/ incl. an update of https://wiki.dbpedia.org/Datasets
• The new forum – https://forum.dbpedia.org is already ready to register, but needs some structure. Intended as replacement of support.dbpedia.org

In addition some announcements of on-going projects:

• GlobalFactSync (GFS) – Syncing facts between Wikipedia and Wikidata
• Energy Databus: LOD GEOSS project focusing on energy system data on the bus
• Supply-Chain-Management Databus – PLASS project focusing on SCM data on the bus

So, stay tuned for our upcoming posts and follow our journey.

Yours

DBpedia Association

The post DBpedia Growth Hack – Fall/Winter 2019 appeared first on DBpedia Association.

There you go.

With our new strategic orientation and the emergence of the DBpedia Databus, we wanted to meet some DBpedia enthusiasts of the German DBpedia Community.

The recently hosted 6th LSWT (Leipzig Semantic Web Day) on June 18th, was the perfect platform for DBpedia to meet with researchers, industry and other organizations to discuss current and future developments of the semantic web.

Under the motto “Linked Enterprises Data Services”, experts in academia and industry talked about the interlinking of open and commercial data of various domains such as e-commerce, e-government, and digital humanities.

Sören Auer, DBpedia endorser and board member as well as director of TIB, the German National Library of Science and Technology, opened the event with an exciting keynote. Recapping the evolution of the semantic and giving a glimpse into the future of integrating more cognitive processes into the study of data,  he highlighted the importance of AI, deep learning, and machine learning. They are as well as cognitive data, no longer in their early stages but advanced to fully grown up sciences.

Shortly after, Sebastian Hellmann, director of the DBpedia Association, presented the new face of DBpedia as a global open knowledge network. DBpedia is not just the most successful open knowledge graph so far, but also has a deep inside knowledge about all connected open knowledge graphs (OKG) and how they are governed. 

With our new credo connecting data is about linking people and organizations, the global DBpedia platform aims at sharing efforts of OKG governance, collaboration, and curation to maximize societal value and develop a linked data economy.

The DBpedia Databus functions as Metadata Subscription Repository, a platform that allows exchanging, curate and access data between multiple stakeholders. In order to maximize the potential of your data, data owners need a WebID to sign their Metadata with a private key in order to make use of the full Databus services.  Instead of one huge monolithic release every 12 months the Databus enables easier contributions and hence partial releases (core, mapping, wikidata, text, reference extraction) at their own speed but in much shorter intervals (monthly). Uploading data on the databus means connecting and comparing your data to the network. We will offer storage services, free & freemium services as well as data-as-a-service.  A first demo is available via http://downloads.dbpedia.org/databus

During the lunch break, LSWT participants had time to check out the poster presentations. 4 of the 18 posters used DBpedia as a source. One of them was Birdory, a memory game developed during the Coding Da Vinci hackathon, that started in April 2018. Moreover, other posters also used the DBpedia vocabulary.

Afternoon Session

In the afternoon, participants of LSWT2018 joined hands-on tutorials on SPARQL and WebID. During the SPARQL tutorial, ten participants learned about the different query types, graph patterns, filters, and functions as well as how to construct SPARQL queries step by step with the help of a funny Monty Python example.

Afterwards, DBpedia hosted a hands-on workshop on WebID, the password-free authentication method using semantics. The workshop aimed at enabling participants to set up a public/private key, a certificate, and a WebID.  Everything they needed to bring was a laptop and an own webspace. Supervised by DBpedia’s executive director Dr. Sebastian Hellmann and developer Jan Forberg, people had to log-into a test web service at the end of the session, to see if everything worked out. All participants seemed well satisfied with the workshop –  even if not everyone could finish it successfully they got a lot of individual help and many hints. For support purposes, DBpedia will stay close in touch with those participants.

Thanks to Institut für Angewandte Informatik as well to the LEDS -project and eccenca for organizing LSWT2018 and keeping the local semantic web community thriving.

Upcoming Events:

We are currently looking forward to our next DBpedia meetup in Lyon, France on July 3rd and the DBpedia Day co-located with Semantics 2018 in Vienna. Contributions to both events are still welcome. Send your inquiry to dbpedia@infai.org.

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

The post Career Opportunities at DBpedia – A Success Story appeared first on DBpedia Association.