DBpedia Blog

More than 140 DBpedia enthusiasts joined the Community Meeting in Amsterdam.

by Julia Holze, in Event

Summary

After the success of the last two community meetings in Sunnyvale and in Galway, we thought it is time to go Orange again. During the SEMANTiCS 2017 in Amsterdam, Sep 11-14, the DBpedia Community met on the 14th of September. First and foremost, we would like to thank the Institute for Applied Informatics for supporting our community and many thanks to the Meervaart Theatre and the SEMANTiCS for hosting our community meeting.

picture by Andrea Volpini

Opening Session

Chris Welty

During the opening session, Chris Welty, Google Researcher, presented Even the Changes Are Changing: A New Age of Cognitive Computing. He introduced the impact and challenges of question answering & AI as well as the development of Jeopardy through technical changes. Victor de Boer from the VU University talked about Semantic Technology for Development: Semantic Web without the Web?. He demonstrated the use of semantic technology in the challenging technical environment of developing countries. Both talks illustrated the ever growing importance of semantic technology and AI each placed at opposite sites of the technology spectrum, from Raspberry PIs to High Performance Clusters.

Showcase Session

The DBpedia Showcase Session started with an interactive interview. Sebastian Hellmann (AKSW/KILT) talked with Jan-Bart de Vreede (Kennisnet, former member of the Wikimedia Foundation) about the challenges of growing an open community and creating a more formal structure. They discussed advantages, pitfalls and what lessons can be learned from other communities such as Wikimedia. Afterwards Markus Freudenberg (AKSW/KILT) introduced the highlights of the 2016-10 DBpedia Release.

At this session, five speakers presented how to utilize DBpedia in novel and interesting ways. Including:

  • Virtuoso 8 and Scalable Attributed-based Access Controls (ABAC) by Patrick van Kleef (Openlink Software)
  • Learning to Associate DBpedia Entities like Humans by Joern Hees (DFKI) (demo)
  • Towards Using UnifiedViews for Executing DBpedia Data Extraction and Curation Tasks by Tomas Knap (Semantic Web Company)
  • Sustainable Linked Data Generation: The Case of DBpedia by Wouter Maroy (imec)
  • Mappings UI by Ismael Rodríguez (Polytechnic University of Catalonia)
Wouter Maroy & Ismael Rodríguez

Parallel Session

As a regular part of the DBpedia Community Meeting, we had two parallel sessions in the afternoon where DBpedia newbies can learn about what DBpedia is and how to use the DBpedia datasets. Participants who wanted to learn DBpedia basics joined the tutorial session by Markus Freudenberg (DBpedia Release Manager). The DBpedia Association Hour provided a platform for the community to discuss the results of the DBpedia Strategy Survey 2017. This survey was prepared by Sören Auer and the DBpedia Board members to get to know what the DBpedia Community thinks about DBpedia’s strategic priorities and how the funds of the DBpedia Association should be spent. Even if 45 minutes were not adequate to review all survey questions, this session proved to be beneficial due to a really agile and dynamic discussion. A better cooperation and communication between the Association and the different national and language chapter is only one suitable key which was embraced by the community to facilitate problem solving and DBpedia’s organization.

Afternoon Track

The sessions in the afternoon highlighted two important fields of research and development, namely DBpedia Ontology and DBpedia & NLP. At the DBpedia Ontology Session, Gustavo Publio (AKSW/KILT) presented data quality issues in DBpedia and highlighted the challenges on redesign the DBpedia Ontology (slides).  Wouter Maroy (imec) and Ismael Rodríguez (Polytechnic University of Catalonia) showcased the DBpedia Mappings Front-End Administration, which they created during this year’s Google Summer of Code project. If you are interested in career opportunities at DBpedia, check out Wouter’s success story here.

Gustavo Publio

At the same time, Milan Dojchinovski (AKSW/KILT) chaired the DBpedia & NLP session with five very interesting talks. In the following you will find all presentations given during this session:

Dutch DBpedia Hour & Joint Workshop

Enno Meijers (National Library of the Netherlands) chaired the Dutch DBpedia Hour. In this open session members of the Dutch DBpedia Language Chapter discussed tasks and responsibilities for sustaining and developing the Dutch DBpedia as well as communication, technical infrastructure and content improvement of the DBpedia Dutch Language Chapter. The reference for this discussion was the tasks and responsibilities stated in the Memorandum of Understanding signed by Huygens ING, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, iMec and Beeld en Geluid. Outcome of this session was an agreement on the approach for creating an operational plan.

Simultaneously, DBpedia joint a session with the Workshop “Linked Data Quality Assessment and Improvement from Academia to Industry”. The presentations are available below:

Amit Kirschenbaum & Magnus Knuth

In the closing session, Sebastian Hellmann (AKSW/KILT) announced a new collaboration to strengthen the DBpedia NLP Department. Via videostream we talked with Mike Tung and Filipe Mesquita from diffbot, about NLP and the relation extraction from Wikipedia articles. If you are interested in the new collaboration, please check diffbot’s slides here.

All slides and presentations are also available on our Website and you will find more feedback and photos about the event on Twitter via #DBpediaAmsterdam17.

We would like to thank the DBpedia Dutch language chapter, especially Enno Meijers (National Library of the Netherlands), Lieke Verhelst (Linked Data Factory, Informagic), Victor de Boer (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Roland Cornelissen (metamatter), Gerald Wildenbeest (Saxion), Gerard Kuys (Ordina), Maarten Brinkerink (The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision) as well as Julia Holze (DBpedia Association), Dimitris Kontokostas (DBpedia Chapter Coordinator) and Sebastian Hellmann (AKSW/KILT, DBpedia Association) for devoting their time to curating the program and organizing the meeting.

Special thanks go to Katharina Weissenberg and Anna Keil for supporting the meeting by taking pictures of the community and the event.

We are now looking forward to the 11th DBpedia Community Meeting which will be held on 12th of October 2017 in Cupertino, California. Visit our event page for further updates.

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