After our 2nd Community Meeting in the US, we delighted the Irish DBpedia Community with the 9th DBpedia Community Meeting, which was co-located with the Language, Data and Knowledge Conference 2017 in Galway at the premises of the NUI Galway.

First and foremost, we would like to thank John McCrae (Insight Centre for Data Analytics, NUI Galway) and the LDK Conference for co-hosting and support the event.

The focus of this Community Meeting was the Irish DBpedia and Linked Data Community in Ireland. Therefore we invited local data scientists as well as European DBpedia enthusiasts to discuss the state of Irish Linked Data.

The meeting started with two compelling keynotes by Brian Ó Raghallaigh, Dublin City University and Logainm.ie, and Sharon Flynn, NUI Galway and Wikimedia Ireland. Brian presented Logainm.ie, a data use case about placenames in Ireland with a special focus on linked Logainm and machine-readable data.

His insightful presentation was followed by Sharon Flynn talking about Wikimedia in Ireland and the challenges of “this monumental undertaking” with particular reference to the Wikimedia Community in Ireland.

For more details on the content of the presentations, follow the links to the slides.

Brian’s and Sharon’s slides

Showcase Session

Eoin McCuirc started the DBpedia Showcase Session “MY sweet LOD”, an insightful presentation on Linked Open Data in Ireland from the perspective of a statistics office.

Shortly after, Ronald Stamper, Chairman of Measur Ltd. elaborated on semantic normal form, ontologies and the perils of paradigm change.

Ben De Meester, from Ghent University, presented the first DBpedia Showcase about Declarative Data Transformation for Linked Data Generation.

Followed by another showcase by Alan Meehan, presenting the SUMMR Interlink Validation tool which validates Interlinks from a source dataset to multiple targets.

Closing the Showcase Session,  Frederico Araujo Durao, Insight Centre for Data Analytics – University College Cork (UCC), presented a demo of his linked data browser.

For further details of the presentations follow the links to the slides.

• Eoin McCuirc –  My Sweet LOD
• Ronald  Stamper – The Perils of Paradigm Change
• Ben De Meester – Declarative Data Transformation ..[..]
• Alan Mehan  – Validating Interlinks with the SUMMR Interlink Validation Tool
• Frederico Araujo Durao:  – Linked Data Browser

Parallel sessions

As a regular part of the DBpedia Community Meeting we have two parallel sessions in the afternoon where DBpedia newbies can learn about what DBpedia is and how to use the DBpedia data sets.

Participants who wanted to learn DBpedia basics joined the DBpedia Tutorial Session by Markus Freudenberg (DBpedia Release Manager). The DBpedia Association Hour provided a platform for the community to discuss and give feedback.

Additionally, Sebastian Hellmann and Julia Holze, members of the DBpedia Association, updated the participants about the growing number of the DBpedia Association members, the formalized DBpedia language chapters, the established DBpedia Community Committee and they informed about technical developments such as the DBpedia API.

Ontology Engineering and Software Alignment in the ALIGNED Project

The afternoon session started with the DBpedia 2016-10 release update by Markus Freudenberg (DBpedia Release Manager). Following this, Kevin Chekov Feeney, (Trinity College Dublin) presented the software alignment in the ALIGNED project. He talked about “Generating correct-by-construction semantic datasets from unstructured, semi-structured and badly structured data sources”.

At this point, we also like to thank the ALIGNED project for the development of DBpedia as a project use case and for covering parts of the travel cost.

Session about Irish Linked Data Projects

Chaired by Rob Brennan and Bianca Pereira, the speakers in the last session presented new Irish Linked Data Projects, for example GeoHive, BIOOPENER and the TCD Open Linked Data Engagement Fund Project. The following panel session gave DBpedia and Linked Data enthusiasts a platform for exchange and discussion. Outcome of this session was the creation of a roadmap for the Irish Linked Data with all participants.     

Following, you find a list of all presentations of this session:

• Alan Meehan – GeoHive: Irish Geospatial Linked Data from Ordnance Survey Ireland
• Rob Brennan – TCD Open Linked Data Enagement Fund Project – Enhancing data.gov.ie Linked Data
• Ratnesh Sahay – BIOOPENER: Linking & Querying Cancer Genomics Repositories
• Rob Brennan, Bianca Perera & Eoin McCuirc –  The State of the Irish Linked Data

Closing this session John McCrae announced that the next edition of the Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK) Conference is scheduled for 2019 in Germany. We at the DBpedia Association are now looking forward to welcome the LDK Community in Leipzig!

Social Evening Event

The Community Meeting slowly came to an end with our social evening event, which was held at the PorterShed in Galway. The evening session revolved around the topic How to exploit data commercially? and featured two short impulse talks. Paul Buitelaar started the session by presenting “Kibi”, which is an Open Source platform for Data Intelligence based on the search engine Elasticsearch. Finally, Sebastian Hellmann talked about “Improving the Utility of DBpedia by co-designing a public and commercial DBpedia API” (slides).

Summing up, the 9th DBpedia Community Meeting brought together more than 45 DBpedia enthusiasts from Ireland and Europe who engaged in vital discussions about Linked Data, DBpedia use cases and services.

You can find feedback about the event on Twitter via  #DBpediaGalway17.

We would like to thank Bianca Pereira and Caoilfhionn Lane from Insight Centre for Data Analytics, NUI Galway, as well Rob Brennan from ADAPT Research Centre, Trinity College Dublin, for devoting their time to curating the program organizing the meeting.

Special thanks go to LDK 2017 for hosting the meeting.

Thanks Ireland and hello Amsterdam!

We are looking forward to the next DBpedia Community Meeting which will be held in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Co-located with the SEMANTiCS17, the Community will get together on the 14th of September on the DBpedia Day.

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

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