More than 150 DBpedia enthusiasts @ the 7th Community Meeting in Leipzig

After the success of the last two community meetings in Palo Alto and in The Hague we thought it is time to meet in Leipzig, where the DBpedia Association is located. During the SEMANTiCS 2016 in Leipzig, Sep 12-15, the DBpedia community met on the 15th of September. First and foremost, we would like to thank the Institute for Applied Informatics for supporting our community, the University of Leipzig for hosting our meeting and many thanks to the SEMANTiCS for hosting and sponsoring the meeting.

Opening Session

During the opening session, Lydia Pintscher, product manager of Wikidata, presented Wikidata: bringing structured data to Wikipedia with 16000 volunteers. Lydia described similarities and varieties between DBpedia and Wikidata and she talked about prospective steps for Wikidata. Harald Sack from the Hasso-Plattner-Institut spoke during the opening session, too. He introduced the dwerft Project – DBpedia and Linked Data for the Media Value Chaintopics which aims the common technology platform »Linked Production Data Cloud«.

Showcase Session

The DBpedia showcase session started with the DBpedia 2016-04 release update by Markus Freudenberg (AKSW/KILT). At this session, six speakers presented how to utilize DBpedia in novel and interesting ways. For example:

• Miel Vander Sande (iMinds) talked about DBpedia Archives as Memento with Triple Pattern Fragments.
• Jörn Hees (DFKI) introduced us to Human associations in the Semantic Web and DBpedia.
• Peter de Laat from GoUnitive urged the community to personalize user interaction in a Linked Data environment.

DBpedia Association hour

The 7th edition of the community meeting covered the first DBpedia Association hour, which provided a platform for the community to discuss and give feedback. Sebastian Hellmann (AKSW, KILT), Julia Holze (DBpedia Association) and Dimitris Kontokostas (AKSW, KILT) gave an update on the DBpedia Association status. We talked about our technical progress, DBpedia funding and visions. Sebastian Hellmann introduced the Board of Trustees, which is the main decision-making body of the DBpedia Association and oversees the association and its work as its ultimate corporate authority.

Enno Meijers (KB) of the Dutch DBpedia chapter announced a successful cooperation between Huygens ING, iMinds/Univ. Gent, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Institute for Sound and Vision, Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) and the NL-DBpedia community. By signing the Manifest of Understanding (MoU) they support the goals of the DBpedia Association officially and strengthen the Dutch chapter and community.

You will find community feedback and all questions which we discussed at the first DBpedia Association hour here: https://pad.okfn.org/p/how-to-improve-DBpedia. Participants who wanted to learn DBpedia basics joined the DBpedia tutorial session by Markus Freudenberg (AKSW/KILT).

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, Wouter Maroy (iMinds) presented DBpedia RML mappings, which he created during this year’s Google Summer of Code project and Gerard Kuys (Ordina) discussed the question ‘Does extraction prelude structure?’ with the DBpedia ontology group. At the same time, Milan Dojchinovski (AKSW/KILT) chaired the DBpedia & NLP session with eight very interesting talks. You will find all presentations given during this session on our website. The last two presentations Analyzing and improving the Polish Wikipedia Citations (part of the Wikipedia References & Citations challenge) and Greek DBpedia updates were given by Krzysztof Węcel (Poznan University) and Sotiris Karampatakis (OKF Greece).

On the closing session we wrapped up the meeting and gave out our prizes to:

• The “DBpedia Excellence in Engineering” went to Markus Freudenberg for keeping up with the DBpedia releases
• The “Citations Challenge prize” went to Krzysztof Węcel for his very thorough citation analysis.

All slides and presentations are also available on our Website and you will find more feedback and photos about the event on Twitter via #DBpediaLeipzig2016.

Summing up, the event brought together more than 150 DBpedians from Europe which engaged in vital conversations about interesting projects and approaches to questions/problems revolving around DBpedia. We would like to thank the organizers Magnus Knuth (HPI, DBpedia German & Commons), Monika Solanki (University of Oxford) and representatives of the DBpedia Association such as Dimitris Kontokostas, Sebastian Hellmann and Julia Holze for devoting their time to the organization of the meeting and the program.

We are now looking forward to the 8th DBpedia Community Meeting (which most probably coming sooner than you think across the Atlantic). Check our website for further updates or follow #DBpedia on twitter.

Your DBpedia Association.