For the second time now, we co-located one of our DBpedia community meetings with the LDK-conference. After the previous edition in Galway two years ago, It was Leipzig’s turn to host the event. Thus, the 13th DBpedia community meeting took place in this beautiful city which is also home to the DBpedia Association’s head office. Win, Win we’d say.
After a very successful LDK conference May 20th-21st, representatives of the European DBpedia community met at Villa Ida Mediencampus, on Thursday, May 23rd, to present their work with DBpedia and to exchange about the DBpedia Databus.
For those of you who missed it or for those who want a little retrospective on the day, this blog post provides you with a short LDK-wrap-up as well as a recap of our DBpedia Day.
First things first
First and foremost, we would like to thank LDK organizers for co-locating our meeting and thus enabling fruitful synergies, and a platform for the DBpedia community to exchange.
LDK
The first presentation that kicked-off the conference was given by Prof. Christiane Fellbaum from Princeton University. The topic of her talk was on “Mapping the Lexicons of Signs and Words” with the main focus on her research of mapping WordNet and SignStudy, a resource for American Sign Language. Shortly after, Prof Eduard Werner from Leipzig University gave a very exciting talk on the “Sorbian languages”. He discussed the nature of the Sorbian languages, their historical background, and the unfortunate imminent extinction of lower Sorbian due to a decline of native speakers.
The first day of LDK was full of exciting presentations related to various language-oriented topics. Researchers exchanged about linguistic vocabularies, SPARQL query recommendations, role and reference grammar, language detection, entity recognition, machine translation, under-resourced languages, metaphor identification, event detection and linked data in general. The first day ended with fruitful discussions during the poster session. After at the end of the first conference day, LDK visitors had the chance to mingle with locals in some of Leipzig’s most exciting bars during a pub crawl.
Prof. Christian Bizer from the University of Mannheim opened the second day with a keynote on “Schema.org Annotations and Web Tables: Underexploited Semantic Nuggets on the Web?”. In his talk, he gave a nice overview of the research on knowledge extraction around the large-scale Web Data Commons corpus, findings, open challenges and possible exploitations of this corpus.
The second day was busy with four sessions, each populated with presentations on exciting topics ranging from relation classification, dictionary linking and entity linking, to terminology models, topical thesauri and morphology.
The series of presentations was ended with an Organ Prelude played by David Timm, the University Music Director at the Leipzig University. Finally, the day and the conference was concluded with a conference dinner at Moritzbastei, one of Leipzig’s famous cultural centres.
DBpedia Day
On May 23rd, the DBpedia Community met for the 13th DBpedia community meeting. The event attracted more than 60 participants who extended their LDK experience or followed our call to Leipzig.
Opening & keynotes
The meeting was opened by Dr. Sebastian Hellmann, the executive director of the DBpedia Association. He gave an overview of the latest developments and achievements around DBpedia, with the main focus on the DBpedia Databus technologies. The first keynote was given by Dr. Peter Haase, from metaphacts, with an unusual interactive presentation on “Linked Data Fun with DBpedia”. The second keynote speaker was Prof. Heiko Paulheim, presenting findings, challenges and results from his work on the construction of the DBkWiki Knowledge Graph by exploiting the DBpedia extraction framework.
Showcase session
The showcases session started with a presentation given by Krzysztof Węcel on “Citations and references in DBpedia”, followed by Peter Nancke with a presentation on the “TeBaQA Question Answering System”, Maribel Acosta Deibe speaking about “Crowdsourcing the Quality of DBpedia” and finally, a presentation by Angus Addlesee on “Data Reconciliation using DBpedia”.
NLP & DBpedia session
The DBpedia & NLP session was opened by Diego Moussallem presenting the results from his work on “Generating Natural Language from RDF Data”. 
The second presentation was given by Christian Jilek on the topic of “Named Entity Recognition for Real-Time Applications”, which at the same time won the best research paper at the LDK conference. Next, Jonathan Kobbe presented the best student paper at the LDK conference on the topic of “Argumentative Relation Classification”. Finally, Edgard Marx closed the session with an overview presentation on “From the word to the resource”.
Side-Event – Hackathon
The “Artificial Intelligence for Smart Agriculture” Hackathon focused on enhancing the usability of automatic analysis tools which utilize semantic big data for agriculture, as well as conducting an outreach of the DataBio project for the DBpedia community. The event was supported by PNO, Spacebel, PSNC, and InfAI e.V.
We improved the visualization module of Albatross, a platform for processing and analyzing Linked Open Data, and added functionalities to geo-L, the geospatial link discovery tool.
In addition, we presented a paper about Linked Data publication pipelines, focusing on agri-related data, at the co-located LSWT conference.
Wrap Up
After the event, DBpedians joined the DBpedia Association in the nearby pub Gosenschenke to delve into more vital talks about the Semantic Web world, Linked Data & DBpedia.
In case you missed the event, all slides and presentations are available on our website. Further insights feedback and photos about the event can be found on Twitter via #DBpediaLeipzig.
We are currently looking forward to the next DBpedia Community Meeting, on Sept, 12th in Karlsruhe, Germany. This meeting is co-located with the SEMANTiCS Conference. Contributions are still welcome. Just ping us via dbpedia@infai.org and show us what you’ve got. You should also get in touch with us if you want to host a DBpedia Meetup yourself. We will help you with the program, the dissemination or organizational matters of the event if need be.
Stay tuned, check Twitter, Facebook, and the website, or subscribe to our newsletter for the latest news and updates.
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