Extraction  – Step one of the Release

The good news is, our new release mode is taking shape and noticeable picked up speed. Finally the 2018-08 and, additionally the 2018.09.12 and the 2018.10.16 Releases are now available in our LTS repository.

The 2018-08 Release was generated on the basis of the Wikipedia datasets extracted in early August and currently comprises 136 languages. The extraction release contains the raw extracted data generated by the DBpedia extraction-framework. The post-processing steps, such as data-deduplication or URI-normalization are omitted and moved to later parts of the release process. Thus, we can provide direct, transparent access to the generated data in every step. Until we manage two releases per month, our data is mostly based on the second Wikipedia datasets of the previous month. In line with that, the 2018.09.12 release is based on late August data and the recent 2018.10.16 Release is based on Wikipedia datasets extracted on September 20th. They all comprise 136 languages and contain a stable list of datasets since the 2018-08 release.

Our releases are now ready for parsing and external use. Additionally, there will be a new Wikidata-based release this week.

ID-Management – Step two of the Release

For a complete “new DBpedia” release the DBpedia ID-Management and Fusion of the data have to be added to the process. The Databus ID Management is a process to unify various different IRIs identifying the same entities coined from different data providers. Taking datasets with overlapping domains of interest from multiple data providers, the set of IRIs denoting the entities in the source datasets are determined heuristically (e.g. excluding RDF/OWL types/classes).

Afterwards, these selected IRIs a numeric primary key, the ‘Singleton ID’. The core of the ID Management process happens in the next step: Based on the large set of owl:sameAs assertions in the input data with high confidence, the connected components induced from the corresponding sameAs-graph is computed. In other words: The groups of all entities from the input datasets (transitively) reachable from one to another are determined. We dubbed these groups the sameAs-clusters. For each sameAs-cluster we pick one member as representant, which determines the ‘Cluster ID’ or ‘Global Identifier’ for all cluster members.

Apart from being an essential preparatory step for the Fusion, these Global Identifiers serve purpose in their own right as unified Linked Data identifiers for groups of Linked Data entities that should be viewed as equivalent or ‘the same thing’.

A processing workflow based on Apache Spark to perform the process described on above for large quantities of RDF input data is already in place and has been run successfully for a large set of DBpedia inputs consisting of:

• the results of the aforementioned 2018-08 release
• mapping-based extractions from 2016-10
• the sameAs-linksets from the DBpedia Wikidata dataset (http://downloads.dbpedia.org/repo/lts/wikidata/) as ‘glue’ for additional linkage between the different language versions of DBpedia

Fusion – Step three of the Release

Based on the extraction and the ID-Management, the Data Fusion finalizes the last step of the  DBpedia release cycle. With the goal of improving data quality and data coverage, the process uses the DBpedia global IRI clusters to fuse and enrich the source datasets. The fused data contains all resource of the input datasets. The fusion process is based on a functional property decision to decide the number of selected values ( owl:FunctionalProperty determination ). Further, the value selection for this functional properties is based on a preference dependent on the originated source dataset. For example, preferred values for En-DBpedia over DE-DBpedia.

The enrichment improves entity-properties and -values coverage for resources only contained in the source data. Furthermore, we create provenance data to keep track of the origin of each triple. This provenance data is also used for the http-based http://global.dbpedia.org resource view.

At the moment the fused and enriched data is available for the generic, and mapping-based extractions. More datasets are still in progress.  The DBpedia-fusion data is uploading to http://downloads.dbpedia.org/repo/dev/fusion/

Please note we are still in the midst of the beta testing for our data release tool, so in case you do come across any errors, reporting them to us is much appreciated to fuel the testing process.

Further information regarding the releases progress can be found here: http://dev.dbpedia.org/

Next steps

We will add more releases to the repository on a monthly basis aiming for a bi-weekly release mode as soon as possible. In between the intervals, any mistakes or errors you find and report in this data can be fixed for the upcoming release. Currently, the generated metadata in the DataID-file is not stable. This will fluctuate, still needs to be improved and will change in the near future.  We are now working on the next release and will inform you as soon as it is published.

Yours DBpedia Association

This blog post was written with the help of our DBpedia developers Robert Bielinski, Markus Ackermann and Marvin Hofer who were responsible for the work done with respect to the DBpedia releases. We like to thank them for their great work. 

The post The Release Circle – A Glimpse behind the Scenes appeared first on DBpedia Association.

Et Voilà

We started out with six students that committed to GSoC projects. However, in the course of the summer, some dropped out or did not pass the midterm evaluation. In the end, we had three finalists that made it through the program.

Meet Bharat Suri

… who worked on “Complex Embeddings for OOV Entities”. The aim of this project was to enhance the DBpedia Knowledge Base by enabling the model to learn from the corpus and generate embeddings for different entities, such as classes, instances and properties.  His code is available in his GitHub repository. Tommaso Soru, Thiago Galery and Peng Xu supported Bharat throughout the summer as his DBpedia mentors.

Meet Victor Fernandez

.. who worked on a “Web application to detect incorrect mappings across DBpedia’s in different languages”. The aim of his project was to create a web application and API to aid in automatically detecting inaccurate DBpedia mappings. The mappings for each language are often not aligned, causing inconsistencies in the quality of the RDF generated. The final code of this project is available in Victor’s repository on GitHub. He was mentored by Mariano Rico and Nandana Mihindukulasooriya.

Meet Aman Mehta

.. whose project aimed at building a model which allows users to query DBpedia directly using natural language without the need to have any previous experience in SPARQL. His task was to train a Sequence-2-Sequence Neural Network model to translate any Natural Language Query (NLQ) into the corresponding sentence encoding SPARQL query. See the results of this project in Aman’s GitHub repository. Tommaso Soru and Ricardo Usbeck were his DBpedia mentors during the summer.

Finally, these projects will contribute to an overall development of DBpedia. We are very satisfied with the contributions and results our students produced.  Furthermore, we like to genuinely thank all students and mentors for their effort. We hope to be in touch and see a few faces again next year.

A special thanks goes out to all mentors and students whose projects did not make it through.

GSoC Mentor Summit

Now it is the mentors’ turn to take part in this year GSoC mentor summit, October 12th till 14th. This year, Mariano Rico and Thiago Galery will represent DBpedia at the event. Their task is to engage in a vital discussion about this years program, about lessons learned, highlights and drawbacks they experienced during the summer. Hopefully, they return with new ideas from the exchange with mentors from other open source projects. In turn, we hope to improve our part of the program for students and mentors.

Sit tight, follow us on Twitter and we will update you about the event soon.

Yours DBpedia Association

The post Retrospective: GSoC 2018 appeared first on DBpedia Association.

Marco Fossati, Dimitris Kontokostas, Tommaso Soru, Domenico Potena, Emanuele Storti , anastasia Dimiou, Wouter Maroy, Peng Xu, Sandro Coelho and Ricardo Usbeck, members of the DBpedia Community, did a great job in mentoring 7 students from around the world. All of the students enjoyed the experiences made during the program and will hopefully continue to contribute to DBpedia in the future.

“GSoC is the perfect opportunity to learn from experts, get to know new communities, design principles and work flows.” (Ram G Athreya)”

Now, we would like to take that opportunity to  give you a little recap of the projects mentored by DBpedia members during the past months. Just click below for more details .

[expander_maker id=”1″ more=”Read more” less=”Read less”]DBpedia Mappings Front-End Administration by Ismael Rodriguez

The goal of the project was to create a front-end application that provides a user-friendly interface so the DBPedia community can easily view, create and administrate DBpedia mapping rules using RML. The developed system includes user administration features, help posts, Github mappings synchronization, and rich RML related features such as syntax highlighting, RML code generation from templates, RML validation, extraction and statistics. Part of these features are possible thanks to the interaction with the DBPedia Extraction Framework. In the end, all the functionalities and goals that were required have been developed, with many functional tests and the approval of the DBpedia community. The system is ready for production deployment. For further information, please visit the project blog.  Mentors: Anastasia Dimou and Wouter Maroy (Ghent University), Dimitris Kontokostas (GeoPhy HQ).

Chatbot for DBpedia by Ram G Athreya

DBpedia Chatbot is a conversational chatbot for DBpedia which is accessible through the following platforms: a Web Interface, Slack and Facebook Messenger.

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). The bot tries to answer text based questions of the following types: natural language questions, location information, service checks, language chapters, templates and banter. For more information, please follow the link to the project site. Mentor: Ricardo Usbeck (AKSW).

Knowledge Base Embeddings for DBpedia by Nausheen Fatma

Knowledge base embeddings has been an active area of research. In recent years a lot of research work such as TransE, TransR, RESCAL, SSP, etc. has been done to get knowledge base embeddings. However none of these approaches have used DBpedia to validate their approach. In this project, I want to achieve the following tasks: i) Run the existing techniques for KB embeddings for standard datasets. ii) Create an equivalent standard dataset from DBpedia for evaluations. iii) Evaluate across domains. iv) Compare and Analyse the performance and consistency of various approaches for DBpedia dataset along with other standard datasets. v) Report any challenges that may come across implementing the approaches for DBpedia. For more information, please follow the links to her project blog and GitHub-repository. Mentors: Tommaso Soru (AKSW) and  Sandro Coelho (KILT).

Knowledge Base Embeddings for DBpedia by Akshay Jagatap

The project defined embeddings to represent classes, instances and properties by implementing Random Vector Accumulators with additional features in order to better encode the semantic information held by the Wikipedia corpus and DBpedia graphs. To test the quality of embeddings generated by the RVA, lexical memory vectors of locations were generated and tested on a modified subset of the Google Analogies Test Set. Check out further information via Akshay’s GitHub-repo. Mentors: Tommaso Soru (AKSW) and Xu Peng (University of Alberta).

The Table Extractor by Luca Vergili

Wikipedia is full of data hidden in tables. The aim of this project was to explore the possibilities of exploiting all the data represented with the appearance of tables in Wiki pages, in order to populate the different chapters of DBpedia through new data of interest. The Table Extractor has to be the engine of this data “revolution”: it would achieve the final purpose of extracting the semi structured data from all those tables now scattered in most of the Wiki pages. In this page you can observe dataset (english and italian) extracted using table extractor . Furthermore you can read log file created in order to see all operations made up for creating RDF triples. I recommend to also see this page, that contains the idea behind the project and an example of result extracted from log files and .ttl dataset. For more details see Luca’s Git-Hub repository. Mentors: Domenico Potena and Emanuele Storti (Università Politecnica delle Marche).

Unsupervised Learning of DBpedia Taxonomy by Shashank Motepalli

Wikipedia represents a comprehensive cross-domain source of knowledge with millions of contributors. The DBpedia project tries to extract structured information from Wikipedia and transform it into RDF.

The main classification system of DBpedia depends on human curation, which causes it to lack coverage, resulting in a large amount of untyped resources. DBTax provides an unsupervised approach that automatically learns a taxonomy from the Wikipedia category system and extensively assigns types to DBpedia entities, through the combination of several NLP and interdisciplinary techniques. It provides a robust backbone for DBpedia knowledge and has the benefit of being easy to understand for end users. details about his work and his code can e found on the projects site. Mentors: Marco Fossati (Università degli Studi di Trento) and Dimitris Kontokostas (GeoPhy HQ). 

The  Wikipedia List-Extractor by Krishanu Konar

This project aimed to augment upon the already existing list-extractor project by Federica in GSoC 2016. The project focused on the extraction of relevant but hidden data which lies inside lists in Wikipedia pages. Wikipedia, being the world’s largest encyclopedia, has humongous amount of information present in form of text. While key facts and figures are encapsulated in the resource’s infobox, and some detailed statistics are present in the form of tables, but there’s also a lot of data present in form of lists which are quite unstructured and hence its difficult to form into a semantic relationship. The main objective of the project was to create a tool that can extract information from Wikipedia lists and form appropriate RDF triplets that can be inserted in the DBpedia dataset. Fore details on the code and about the project check Krishanu’s blog and GitHub-repository. Mentors: Marco Fossati (Università degli Studi di Trento), Domenico Potena and Emanuele Storti (Università Politecnica delle Marche). [/expander_maker]

We are regularly growing our community through GSoC and can deliver more and more opportunities to you. Ideas and applications for the next edition of GSoC are very much welcome. Just contact us via email or check our website for details.

Again, DBpedia is planning to be a vital part of the GSoC Mentor Summit, from October 13th -15th, at the Google Campus in Sunnyvale California. This summit is a way to say thank you to the mentors for the great job they did during the program. Moreover it is a platform to discuss what can be done to improve GSoC and how to keep students involved in their communities post-GSoC.

And there is more good news to tell.  DBpedia wants to meet up with the US community during the 11th DBpedia Community Meeting in California.  We are currently working on the program and keep you posted as soon as registration is open.

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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