Main Event

First and foremost, we would like to thank Apple for the warm welcome and the hosting of the event.

After a Meet & Greet with refreshments, Taylor Rhyne, Eng. Product Manager at Apple, and Pablo N. Mendes, Researcher at Apple and chair of the DBpedia Community Committee, opened the main event with a short introduction setting the tone for the following 2 hours.

The main event attracted attendees with eleven invited talks from major companies of the Bay Area actively using DBpedia or interested in knowledge graphs in general such as Diffbot, IBM, Wikimedia, NTENT, Nuance, Volley and Stardog Union.

Tommaso Soru (University of Leipzig), DBpedia mentor in our Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects, opened the invited talks session with the updates from the DBpedia developer community. This year, DBpedia participated in the GSoC 2017 program with 7 different projects including “First Chatbot for DBpedia”, which was selected as Best DBpedia GSoC Project 2017. His presentation is available here. 

DBpedia likes to thank the following poeple for organizinga nd hosting our Community Meeting in Cupertino, California.

• Pablo N. Mendes (host, program chair), Apple Inc.
• Taylor Rhyne (host), Apple Inc.
• Magnus Knuth, AKSW/KILT
• Filipe Mesquita, diffbot
• Dimitris Kontokostas, DBpedia Chapter Coordinator
• Sebastian Hellmann, AKSW/KILT, DBpedia Association
• Anna Lisa Gentile (IBM Research) and Samuel Goto (Google)

Further Acknowledgments

Invited Talks- A Short Recap

Filipe Mesquita (Diffbot) introduced the new DBpedia NLP Department, born from a recent partnership between our organization and the California based company, which aims at creating the most accurate and comprehensive database of human knowledge. His presentation is available here. Dan Gruhl (IBM Research) held a presentation about the in-house development of an omnilingual ontology and how DBpedia data supported this

endeavor. Stas Malyshev representative for Dario Taraborelli (both Wikimedia Foundation) presented the current state of the structured data initiatives at Wikidata and the query capabilities for Wikidata. Their slides are available here and here. Ricardo Baeza-Yates (NTENT) gave a short talk on mobile semantic search.

The second part of the event saw Peter F. Patel-Schneider (Nuance) holding a presentation with the title “DBpedia from the Fringe” giving some insights on how DBpedia could be further improved. Shortly after, Sebastian Hellmann, Executive Director of the DBpedia Association, walked the stage and presented the state of the art of the association, including achievements and future goals. Sanjay Krishnan (U.C. Berkeley) talked about the link between AlphaGo and data cleansing. You can find his slides here.  Bill Andersen (Volley.com) argued for the use of extremely precise and fine-grained approaches to deal with small data. His presentation is available here. Finally, Michael Grove (Stardog Union) stressed on the view of knowledge graphs as knowledge toolkits backed by a graph data model.

The event concluded with refreshments, snacks and drinks served in the atrium allowing to talk about the presented topics, discuss the latest developments in the field of knowledge graphs and network between all participants. In the end, this closing session was way longer than had been planned.

GSoC Mentor Summit

Shortly after the CA Community Meeting, our DBpedia mentors Tommaso Soru and Magnus Knuth participated at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit held in Sunnyvale California. During free sessions hosted by mentors of diverse open source organizations, Tommaso and Magnus presented selected projects during their lightning talks. Beyond open source, open data topics have been targeted in multiple sessions, as this is not only relevant for research, but there is also a strong need in software projects. The meetings paved the way for new collaborations in various areas, e.g. the field of question answering over the DBpedia knowledge corpus, in particular the use of Neural SPARQL Machines for the translation of natural language into structured queries. We expect that this hot deep-learning topic will be featured in the next edition of GSoC projects. Overall, it has been a great experience to meet so many open source fellows from all over the world.

Upcoming events

After the event is before another ….

Connected Data London, November 16th, 2017.

Sebastian Hellmann, executive director of the DBpedia Association will present Data Quality and Data Usage in a large-scale Multilingual Knowledge Graph during the content track at the Connected Data in London. He will also join the panelists in the late afternoon panel discussion about Linked Open Data: Is it failing or just getting out of the blocks? Feel free to join the event and support DBpedia.

A message for all  DBpedia enthusiasts – our next Community Meeting

Currently we are planning our next Community Meeting  and would like to invite DBpedia enthusiasts and chapters who like to host a meeting to send us their ideas to dbpedia@infai.org. The meeting is scheduled for the beginning of 2018. Any suggestions regarding place, time, program and topics are welcome!  

Check our website for further updates, follow us on #twitter or subscribe to our newsletter.

We will keep you posted

Your DBpedia Association

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The meetup focuses on connecting the community interested in DBpedia and Knowledge Graphs in general, has included lightning talks by distinguished speakers (e.g. from Stanford, Google, IBM Watson, Netflix, LinkedIn, Wikimedia Foundation, Nuance, etc.). Talk topics have extended also to natural language processing, knowledge representation, information extraction, integration and retrieval, graph databases, knowledge base embeddings and machine learning.

We are looking forward to meeting again in person with the US-based DBpedia Community.

Quick facts

• Web URL: http://wiki.dbpedia.org/meetings/California2017
• Hashtag: #DBpediaCA
• When: October 12th, 2017
• Where: Apple Inc., De Anza 3 Theater and Atrium (1st floor), 10500 N De Anza Blvd, Cupertino, CA 95014-2033, United States

• Host: Apple Inc.
• Registration: through eventbrite (limited seats)

Schedule

Please check our schedule for the next DBpedia Community Meeting here: http://wiki.dbpedia.org/meetings/California2017

Acknowledgments

If you would like to become a sponsor for the 11th DBpedia Meeting, please contact the DBpedia Association.

Organisation

• Pablo N. Mendes (host, program chair), Apple Inc.
• Taylor Rhyne (host), Apple Inc.
• Magnus Knuth, AKSW/KILT
• Filipe Mesquita, diffbot
• Dimitris Kontokostas, DBpedia Chapter Coordinator
• Sebastian Hellmann, AKSW/KILT, DBpedia Association
• Thanks to Anna Lisa Gentile (IBM Research) and Samuel Goto (Google)

Registration

Attending the DBpedia Community Meeting is free of charge, but seats are limited. Make sure to register to reserve a seat.

We are looking forward to meeting you in California.

Check our website for further updates, follow us on #twitter or subscribe to our newsletter.

Your DBpedia Association

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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

The post GSoC 2017 – Recap and Results appeared first on DBpedia Association.

Main Event

Pablo Mendes from Lattice Data Inc. opened the main event with a short introduction setting the tone for the evening. After that Dimitris Kontokostas gave technical and organizational DBpedia updates. The main event attracted attendees with lightning talks from major companies actively using DBpedia or interested in knowledge graphs in general.

Four major institutions described their efforts to organize reusable information in a centralized knowledge representation. Google’s Tatiana Libman presented (on behalf of Denny Vrandečić) the impressive scale of the Google Knowledge graph, with 1B+ entities and over 100 billion facts.

Yahoo’s Nicolas Torzec presented the Yahoo knowledge graph, with focus on their research on extracting data from Web tables to expand their knowledge which includes DBpedia as an important part. Qi He from LinkedIn focused mostly on how to model a knowledge graph of people and skills, which becomes particularly interesting with the possibility of integration with Microsoft’s Satori Graph. Such an integration would allow general domain knowledge and very specific knowledge about professionals complementing one another. Stas Malyshev from Wikidata presented statistics on their growth, points of contact with DBpedia as well as an impressive SPARQL query interface that can be used to query the structured data that they are generating.

Three other speakers focused on the impact of DBpedia in machine learning and natural language processing. Daniel Gruhl from IBM Watson gave the talk “Truth for the impatient” where he showed that a knowledge model built from DBpedia can help costs and time to value for extracting entity mentions with higher accuracy. Pablo Mendes from Lattice Data Inc. presented their approach that leverages DBpedia and other structured information sources for weak supervision to obtain very strong NLP extractors. Sujan Perera from IBM Watson discussed the problem of identifying implicit mentions of entities in tweets and how the knowledge represented in DBpedia can be used to help uncover those references.

Another three speakers focused on applications of DBpedia and knowledge graphs. Margaret Warren from Metadata Authoring Systems, LLC presented ImageSnippets and how background knowledge from DBpedia allows better multimedia search through inference. For instance, by searching for “birds” you may find pictures that haven’t been explicitly tagged as birds but for which the fact can be inferred from DBpedia. Jans Aasman from Franz Inc presented their company’s approach to Data Exploration with Visual SPARQL Queries. They described opportunities for graph analytics in the medical domain, and discussed how DBpedia has been useful in their applications. Finally, Wang-Chiew Tan presented their research at RIT relating to building chatbots, among other projects that relate to using background knowledge stored in computers to enrich real life experiences.

Overall the talks were very high quality and fostered plenty of discussions afterwards. We finalized the event with a round of introductions where every attendee got to say their name and affiliation to help them connect with one another throughout the final hour of the event.

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

We would like to thank Yahoo for hosting the event, Google Summer of Code 2016 mentor summit as the reason we were in the area and collocated the DBpedia meeting, the Institute for Applied Informatics for supporting the DBpedia Association, ALIGNED – Software and Data Engineering for funding the development of DBpedia as a project use-case and last but not least OpenLink Software for continuous hosting the main DBpedia Endpoint.

Thanks to Pablo Mendes for providing oneliner summaries for the talks

So now, we are looking forward to the next DBpedia community meeting which will be held in Europe again. We will keep you informed via the DBpedia Website and Blog.

Your DBpedia Association

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The event will feature talks from Yahoo, IBM Watson, LinkedIn, Lattice, Wikimedia, Frank Inc, Knoesis, RIT and ImageSnippets. The topics will include knowledge graphs & machine learning, open data, open source and startups. Please read below on different ways you can participate. We are looking forward to meeting again in person with the US-based DBpedia community.

Quick facts

• Web URL: http://wiki.dbpedia.org/meetings/California2016
• Hashtag: #DBpediaCA
• When: October 27th, 2016
• Where: Yahoo, 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA.
• Host: Yahoo
• Call for Contribution: Submit your proposal in our form
• Registration: through eventbrite (limited seats)

Schedule

Please check our schedule for the next DBpedia Community Meeting here: http://wiki.dbpedia.org/meetings/California2016

Acknowledgments

If you would like to become a sponsor for the 8th DBpedia Meeting, please contact the DBpedia Association.

Organisation

• Nicolas Torzec, Yahoo Knowledge Graph.
• Pablo N. Mendes, Lattice Data Inc.
• Dimitris Kontokostas, DBpedia Association and AKSW, Uni Leipzig
• Sebastian Hellmann, DBpedia Association and AKSW, Uni Leipzig

Registration

Attending the DBpedia Community meeting is free of charge, but seats are limited. Make sure to register to reserve a seat.

Location

The meeting will take place at the Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale.

Address: Yahoo! (Building E, 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA)

Many thanks to Yahoo & Nicolas Torzec for providing a bigger room and hosting the event!

Check our website for further updates and like us on Facebook.

Your DBpedia Association

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