Have you backlinked your data yet? – A retrospective of the 6th DBpedia community meeting in The Hague

We thought it was about time to go orange again, meet the Dutch DBpedia Chapter and to meet and celebrate the growing dutch DBpedia community. Thus, following our successful US-event past November, the National Library of the Netherlands hosted the 6th DBpedia community meeting in The Hague on February 12th. 

First and foremost, we would like to thank TNO for organizing the pre-event and the National Library of the Netherlands, especially Menno Rasch (Director of KB operations), for sponsoring the catering during the DBpedia community meeting.

Pre-event

Before diving into DBpedia topics, we had a welcome reception on February 11th with snacks and drinks at TNO – New Babylon.  Around 40 people from the DBpedia community, members from TNO and its Data Science Department and representatives from the Platform Linked Data Netherlands engaged in vital exchanges about Linked Data topics in the Netherlands.

Sebastian Hellmann gave a short introduction about DBpedia and the recently found DBpedia Association. After Jean-Louis Roso talked about the TNO Data Science Department and current developments and projects, Erwin Folmer presented the platform Linked Data Netherlands (PiLOD).

A poster and demo session right after gave people from TNO the opportunity to present and discuss projects currently carried out at TNO.

Following, you find a short list of poster-presentation during the pre-event:

• The Smart Appliances REFerence ontology (SAREF)Standardization in IoT
• Linked Data in Horticulture
• GOOSE: Semantic search in Image Retrieval
• Logistics: Ontologies for the Physical Internet
• SWELL: Smart Reasoning for Well Being

The following social gathering with snacks and drinks, encouraged talks about current developments in the DBpedia community and about ongoing projects. According to TNO representative Laura Daniel, the pre-event was very successful. She summarized the evening of the welcome reception: “It was very inspiring to see the DBpedia community in action. There were lots of interesting projects that use DBpedia as well as lively discussions on the challenges faced by the community, and of course, the event was a great opportunity for networking!”

Main event

Opening Session

Following the pre-event, the main event attracted 95 participants and featured special session dedicated to the DBpedia showcases, the DBpedia ontology and challenges of DBpedia and Digital Heritage.

During the opening session, Menno Rasch, host of the meeting and Director of KB operations, highlighted the importance to raise awareness of the DBpedia brand in order to build a DBpedia community.

The newly found DBpedia Association and the related new charter regulating organizational issues in the DBpedia community was one of the focuses during the early morning hours, right before several interesting keynote presentations opened the discussion about DBpedia and its usage in the Netherlands.

Marco de Niet, representative of Digital Heritage Foundation (DEN Foundation), the Dutch knowledge centre for digital heritage, talked about “the National Strategy for Digital Heritage in the Netherlands”.

Marco Brattinga and Arjen Santema from the Land Registry and Mapping Agency (Kadaster) presented a framework to describe the data and metadata in registration in relation to a concept schema that describes what the registration is about. Apart from the ideas behind the framework, their presentation included a showcase of examples from the cadastral registration as well as the topographic map and the information node addresses and buildings.

The morning session was closes by Paul Groth, from Elsevier giving a presentation about knowledge graph construction and the Role of DBPedia and other Wikipedia based knowledge. He discussed  the importance of structured data as key to coordinate data in order to build better taxonomies. He also pointed towards the importance of having an updated publicly available knowledge graph as a reference for constructing internal knowledge graphs.

After Lunch Track

DBpedia is one of the biggest and most important focal point of the Linked Open Data movement. Thus, the after-lunch-track focused very much on DBpedia Usages during the dedicated showcase session, which started with the new DBpedia & DBpedia+ Data Stack  release (planned for  2016-04).

Afterwards, the session continued with further DBpedia related discussions, in which various practical DBpedia matters such as DBpedia in the EUROPEANA Food and Drink project, the use of DBpedia for improved vaccine information systems or using Elasticsearch + DBpedia to maintain a searchable database of global power plants were tackled.

Afternoon Track

The afternoon track came along with four DBpedia highlight-sessions, namely DBpedia and Ontologies, DBpedia and Heritage, DBpedia hands-on development and DBpedia and NLP. Firstly, the DBpedia ontology group discussed possible ontology usages and presented the results of the latest DBpedia Ontology survey. In the following 75 minutes during the DBpedia and Heritage session, special challenges and opportunities of reference data for digital heritage were addressed by experts from EUROPEANA, iMinds, RCE and KB, the National Library of the Netherlands. Thirdly, members of the DBpedia Association and the AKSW/KILT group from Leipzig led a practical session for developers and DBpedia enthusiasts to talk about technical issues and challenges in DBpedia as well as they held a Tutorial session for DBpedia Newbies.

The end of the event was dedicated to NLP and the application of Linked Data on Language Technologies, especially entity linking, topics which are of vital importance for the research of AKSW/KILT members at the University of Leipzig.

Following, you find a list of all presentations given during the meeting.

• Sebastian Hellmann, DBpedia Association AKSW/KILT – Have you Backlinked your Data yet?
• Marco de Niet, DEN Foundation – Digital Heritage in the Netherlands
• Marco Brattinga and Arjen Santema, Land Registry and Mapping Agency (Kadaster) –  Keynote #1:
• Paul Groth, Elsevier –  Knowledge Graph Construction and the Role of DBPedia
• Antoine Isaac, Europeana – Enriching Cultural Heritage Data with DBpedia
• Patrik Schneider, Siemens and WU Wien – DBpedia Wayback Machine
• Richard Nagelmaeker, – BlueSky – Knowledge Diviner – DBpedia demo 
• Laura Daniele, TNO – GOOSE
• Christina Unger, CITEC – DBlexipedia: A nucleus for a multilingual lexical Semantic Web
• Raphael Boyer, DBpedia FR / INRIA – DBpedia Historic data
• Chris Davis – Using Elasticsearch + DBpedia to maintain a searchable database of global power plants
• Ali Khalili – Linked Data Reactor
• Vladimir Alexiev, Ontotext –  Using DBPedia in Europeana Food and Drink
• Nilesh Chakraborty, AKSW/KILT – FREME  – Open Framework of e-Services for Multilingual and Semantic Enrichment of Digital Content.
• Monika Solanki,University of Oxford – Using DBpedia for improved Vaccine Information Systems
• Ralph Schäfermeier and Alexandru Todor, FU Berlin – WebProtégé demo & aspect oriented programming
• Gerard Kuys / Ordina – Classification Ontology
• Vladimir Alexiev / Ontotext – DBpedia mappings quality problems
• Enno Meijers, Dutch DBpedia – DBpedia & Heritage: Challenges and opportunities of reference data for digital heritage
• Hugo Manguinhas, Europeana – Building an ecosystem of networked references
• Anastasia Dimou, iMinds – RML – generating high quality Linked Data
• Joop Vanderheiden, RCE – Histograph: geocoding places of the pas
• Olaf Janssen,KB – Illegal newspapers in the WOII” Wikipedia/DBpedia project
• Christina Unger, CITEC  – Towards a Linguistic Linked Data Ecosystem (Results of the LIDER project)
• Giuseppe Futia: TellMeFirst – TellMeFirst ­ A Knowledge Domain Discovery Framework
• Chris Davis – Mapping the Bio-economy using DBpedia Spotlight

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

Summing up, the 6th community meeting brought together more than 95 DBpedia enthusiast from the Netherlands and Europe which engaged in vital conversations about interesting projects and approaches to questions/problems revolving around DBpedia, not only during the dedicated session but also during networking breaks. The recently found DBpedia Association was strongly represented with presentations from Sebastian Hellmann, Dimitris Kontokostas,  Nilesh Chakraborty, as well as Markus Freudenberg.

Finally, we would like to thank the organizers Enno Meijers, Richard Nagelmaker, Gerald Wildenbeest, Gerard Kuys, Monika Solanki and representatives of the DBpedia Association such as Dimitris Kontokostas and Sebastian Hellmann for devoting their time to the organization of the meeting and the programme. We are now looking forward to the 7th DBpedia Community Meeting, which will be held in the city of Leipzig again, during the Semantics conference in September 15th, 2016.

For updates, just follow us on Facebook, Twitter or check the following websites: http://www.semantics.cc/ and http://wiki.dbpedia.org/.