Giving knowledge back to Wikipedia: Towards a Systematic Approach to Sync Factual Data across Wikipedia, Wikidata and External Data Sources

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 15:15:00 +0000

Since the beginning of DBpedia, there was always a strong consensus in the community, that one of the goals of DBpedia was to feed semantic knowledge back into Wikipedia again to improve its structure and data quality. It was a topic of many discussions over the years how to achieve this goal. No progress was made — not for the lack of motivation, but for lack of an effective AND efficient approach.

When DBpedia started over 13 years ago, two major impacts were made:

It was the first showcase of the potential of open knowledge graphs through the semantification of Wikipieda’s knowledge which proved useful for the development of thousands of Semantic Web applications and technologies (such as DBpedia Mobile from 2008, long before any knowledge-rich map viewers existed).
DBpedia played a major role as a nucleus, glueing the de-central web of data together into what has grown into the largest (de-centrally-stored, constantly updated) knowledge graph on earth – the linked data web.

Giving knowledge back to Wikipedia

Wikimedia Grant

We received a Wikimedia Grant for our project GlobalFactSyncRE and re-iterated the issue again. After almost two years of working on the topic, we would like to announce our final report. We submitted a summary of this report to the Qurator conference:

Towards a Systematic Approach to Sync Factual Data across Wikipedia, Wikidata and External Data Sources. Sebastian Hellmann, Johannes Frey, Marvin Hofer, Milan Dojchinovski, Krzysztof Wecel and Włodzimierz Lewoniewski.
Please find our self-archived e-print here.

Upcoming Presentation

Don’t miss the talk: Thur, Feb 11th, 2021 @ 10:45 a.m. CET/UTC + 1 as part of the Qurator Conference. Advance registration (for the Scientific Workshop I) necessary.

Highlights of the paper

In sum, we laid a good foundation, but also have many things unfinished. The good thing about the paper is that it brings together many aspects that require attention and drafts a roadmap to bring external data into Wikipedia from Linked Data via DBpedia.
Wikipedia’s infoboxes are still growing a lot. Overall, 150 % in the largest 140 Wikipedias and 200 % for English over the last 3 years.
We could extract and analyse 725 million infobox facts from the largest 140 Wikipedias and 8.8 million references from the largest 11 Wikipedias.
We compared existing data in Wikidata with infoboxes from 40 Wikipedias for ~200 infobox parameters and only found a 20% overlap. Wikidata needs to grow quite a lot in the right direction to be fit to replace the rich and growing infoboxes in Wikipedia, it seems.

Read the submitted paper here.

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Yours,

DBpedia Association

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GlobalFactSync and WikiDataCon2019

Thu, 24 Oct 2019 11:41:10 +0000

We will be spending the next three days in Berlin at WikidataCon 2019, the conference for open data enthusiasts. From October 24th till 26th we will be presenting the latest developments and first results of our work in the GlobalFactSyncRE-Project.

Short Project Intro

Funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, the project started in June 2019 and has two goals:

Answer the following questions:
- How is data edited in Wikipedia and Wikidata?
- Where does it come from?
- How can we synchronize it globally?
Build an information system to synchronize facts between all Wikipedia language-editions, Wikidata, DBpedia and eventually multiple external sources, while also providing respective references.

In order to help Wikipedians to maintain their infoboxes, check for factual correctness, and also improve data in Wikidata, we use data from Wikipedia infoboxes of different languages, Wikidata, and DBpedia and fuse them into our PreFusion dataset (in JSON-LD). More information on the fusion process, which is the engine behind GFS, can be found in the FlexiFusion paper.

Can’t join the conference or want to find out more about GlobalFactSync?

No problem, the poster we are presenting at the conference is currently available here and will soon be available here. Additionally, why not go through our project timeline, follow up on our progress so far and find out what’s coming up next.

In case you have specific questions regarding GlobalfactSync or even some helpful feedback just ping us via dbpedia@infai.org. We also have our new DBpedia Forum, home to the DBpedia Comunity, which just waits for you to initialize a discussion around GlobalFactSync. Why not start it now?

For general DBpedia news and updates follow us on Twitter.

…And if you are in Berlin at WikiDataCon2019 stop by our poster and talk to our developers. They are looking forward to vital exchanges with you.

All the best

yours,