Recap: Google Summer of Code 2021

We received 26 project proposals for this Google Summer of Code (GSoC) edition.

For the 10th year in a row, we were part of this incredible journey of young ambitious developers who joined us as an open-source organization to work on a Google Summer of Code project. 

Each year has brought us new project ideas, many amazing students and mostly great project results that shaped the future of DBpedia. 

One of the advantages of Google Summer of Code is, especially in times like these, the chance to work on projects remotely, but still obtain a first deep dive into Open Source projects like us – DBpedia. 

Meet our Google Summer of Code students and their projects

Throughout the summer program, our ten finalists worked intensely on their challenging DBpedia projects with great outcomes to show to the public. Projects ranged from extending a neural extraction framework to creating a DBpedia Chatbot as well as creating a dashboard for DBpedia Spotlight. If you want to have deeper insights into our GSoC student’s work you can find their blogs and repos in the following list. Check them out! 

• DBpedia Spotlight Dashboard: an integrated statistical information tool from the Wikipedia dumps and the DBpedia Extraction Framework artifacts
• Modular DBpedia Chatbot
• Social Knowledge Graph: Employing SNA measures to Knowledge Graph
• Neural QA Model for DBPedia
• Lifecycle Management of DBpedia Neural QA Models
• Towards a neural extraction framework
• User Centric Knowledge Engineering and Data Visualization
• Web app to generate RDF from DBpedia abstracts
• DBpedia Live Neural Question Answering Chatbot
• Update DBpedia Sparql for newly updated wiki resources and specifically related to pandemic, healthcare, and heath AI fields

Thanks to mentors

Thanks to all our mentors around the world for joining us in this endeavour, for mentoring with kindness and technical expertise. A huge shout out to those who have been by our side for so many years in a row. Many thanks to Tommaso Soru, Beyza Yaman, Diego Moussalem, Ricardo Usbeck, Edgard Marx, Marianno Rico, Thiago Castro Ferreira, Luca Virgili, Ram G Athreya, as well as Sebastian Hellmann, Nausheen Fatma, Said P. Martagon, Krishanu Konar, Zheyuan Bai, Julio Hernandez, Anand Panchbhai, and Jan Forberg. We would also like to thank Andreas Both, Aleksandr Perevalov, Lahiru Hinguruduwa, Marvin Hofer, Maribel Angelica Marin Castro, and Alex Winter, who were mentors for the first time this year. Thank you all again for spending over 3.5+ months working with this year’s GSoC students and helping them become better open source contributors!

Mentor Summit

During the previous years you might have noticed that we always organized a little lottery to decide which mentor or organization admin can join the annual GSoC mentor summit. As this year’s event will be held online, space is open to all organization admins and mentors alike. The GSoC Virtual Mentor Summit takes place on November 4, 2021 and this year we hope all our mentors will find the time to join and exchange with fellow mentors from around dozens of open source projects. 

After GSoC is before the next GSoC

We can not wait for the 2022 edition. Likewise, if you are an ambitious student who is interested in open source development and working with DBpedia you are more than welcome to either contribute your own project idea or apply for project ideas we offer starting in early 2022. If you would like to know where previous mentors and students are now working, please read our last GSoC blog post. 

In case you like to mentor a project do not hesitate to also get in touch with us via dbpedia@infai.org. 

Stay safe and check Twitter or LinkedIn. Furthermore, you can subscribe to our Newsletter for the latest news and information around DBpedia.

Julia

on behalf of the DBpedia Association