GSoC 2020 recap

With 45 project proposals, this GSoC edition marked a new record for DBpedia.

Oh, what a year! For the 9th 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 GSoC coding project all summer. 

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

Even though Covid-19 changed a lot in the world, it couldn’t shake GSoC much. The program, designed to mentor youngsters from afar is almost too perfect for the current world situation. 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 the students and their projects

This year, we had notably more applications than in the previous ones. With 45 project proposals, this GSoC edition marked a new record for DBpedia. Throughout the summer program, our seven finalists worked intensely on their challenging DBpedia projects with great outcomes to show to the public. Projects ranged from extending our DBpedia extraction framework to a DBpedia Database project as well as to an online tool to generate RDF from DBpedia abstracts. 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! 

• RDF-to-text using Generative Adversarial Networks 5
• A Multilingual RDF Verbalizer 4
• Dashboard for Language/National Knowledge Graphs 5
• Extending Extraction Framework with Citations, Commons and Lexeme Extractors 6
• Online Tool to generate RDF from DBpedia abstracts 5
• A Neural QA Model for DBpedia – Compositionality 3
• DBpedia Neural Multilingual QA 4
• Combine DBpedia/Databus with IPFS 3

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, Edgard Marx, Mariano Rico, Thiago Castro Ferreira, Luca Virgili as well as Sebastian Hellmann, Stuart Chan, Amandeep Srivastava, Julio Hernandez and Jan Forberg. 

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 not limited to 300 something mentors but is open to all organization admins and mentors alike. The GSoC Virtual Mentor Summit takes place October 15- 16, 2020 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 2021 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 2021.

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

Stay tuned, frequently check Twitter, LinkedIn or the DBpedia Forum to stay in touch and don’t miss your chance of becoming a crucial force in this endeavour as well as a vital member of the DBpedia community.

See you soon,

yours

DBpedia Association