A new Databus Collection Feature? How come, and how does it work? Read below and find out how using the DBpedia Databus becomes easier by the day and with each new tool.

Motivation

With more and more data being uploaded to the databus we started to develop test applications using that data. The SPARQL endpoint offers a central hub to access all metadata for datasets uploaded to the databus provided you know how to write SPARQL queries. The metadata includes the download links of the data files – it was, therefore, possible to pass a SPARQL query to an application, download the actual data and then use for whatever purpose the app had.

The Databus Collection Editor

The DBpedia Databus now provides an editor for collections. A collection is basically a labelled SPARQL query that is retrievable via URI. Hence, with the collection editor you can group Databus groups and artifacts into a bundle and publish your selection using your Databus account. It is now a breeze to select the data you need, share the exact selection with others and/or use it in existing or self-made applications.

If you are not familiar with SPARQL and data queries, you can think of the feature as a shopping cart for data: You create a new cart, put data in it and tell your friends or applications where to find it. Quite neat, right?

In the following section, we will cover the user interface of the collection editor.

The Editor UI

Firstly, you can find the collection editor by going to the DBpedia Databus and following the Collections link at the top or you can get there directly by clicking here.

What you will see is the following:

General Collection Info

Secondly, since you do not have any collections yet, the editor has already created an empty collection named “Unnamed” for you. At the right side next to the label and description you will find a pen icon. By clicking the icon or the label itself you can edit its content. The collection is not published yet, so the Collection URI is blank.

Whenever you are not logged in or the collection has not been published yet, the editor will also notify you that your changes are only saved in your local browser cache and NOT remotely on our server. Keep that in mind when clearing your cache. Publishing the collection however is easy: Simply log into (or create) your Databus account and hit the publish button in the action bar. This will open up a modal where you can pick your unique collection id and hit publish again. That’s it!

The Collection Info section will now show the collection URI. Following the link will take you to the HTML representation of your collection that will be visible to others. Hitting the Edit button in the action bar will bring you back to the editor.

Collection Hierarchy

Let’s have a look at the core piece of the collection editor: the hierarchy view. A collection can be a bundle of different Databus groups and artifacts but is not limited to that. If you know how to write a SPARQL query, you can easily extend your collection with more powerful selections. Therefore, the hierarchy is split into two nodes:

• Generated Queries: Contains all queries that are generated from your selection in the UI
• Custom Queries: Contains all custom written SPARQL queries

Both, hierarchy nodes have a “+” icon. Clicking on this button will let you add generated or custom queries respectively.

Custom Queries

If you hit the “+” icon on the Custom Queries node, a new node called “Custom Query” will appear in the hierarchy. You can remove a custom query by clicking on the trashcan icon in the hierarchy. If you click the node it will take you to a SPARQL input field where you can edit the query.

To make your collection more understandable for others, you can even document the query by adding a label and description.

Writing Your Own Custom Queries

A collection query is a SPARQL query of the form:

SELECT DISTINCT ?file WHERE {
    {
        [SUBQUERY]
    }
    UNION
    {
        [SUBQUERY]
    }
    UNION
    ...
    UNION
    {
        [SUBQUERY]
    }
}

All selections made by generated and custom queries will be joined into a single result set with a single column called “file“. Thus it is important that your custom query binds data to a variable called “file” as well.

Generated Queries

Clicking the “+” icon on the Generated Queries node will take you to a search field. Make use of the indexed search on the Databus to find and add the groups and artifacts you need. If you want to refine your search, don’t worry: you can do that in the next step!

Once the artifact or group has been added to your collection, the Add to Collection button will turn green. Once you are done you can go back to the Editor with Back to Hierarchy button.

Your hierarchy will now contain several new nodes.

Group Facets, Artifact Facets and Overrides

Group and artifacts that have been added to the collection will show up as nodes in the hierarchy. Clicking a node will open a filter where you can refine your dataset selection. Setting a filter to a group node will apply it to all artifact nodes unless you override that setting in any artifact node manually. The filter set in the group node is shown in the artifact facets in dark grey. Any overrides in the artifact facets will be highlighted in green:

Group Nodes

A group node will provide a list of filters that will be applied to all artifacts of that group:

Artifact Nodes

Artifact nodes will then actually select data files which will be visible in the faceted view. The facets are generated dynamically from the available variants declared in the metadata.

Example: Here we selected the latest version of the databus dump as n-triple. This collection is already in use: The collection URI is passed to the new generic lookup application, which then creates the search function for the databus website. If you are interested in how to configure the lookup application, you can go here: https://github.com/dbpedia/lookup-application. Additionally, there will also be another blog post about the lookup within the next few weeks

Use Cases

The DBpedia Databus Collections are useful in many ways.

• You can share a specific dataset with your community or colleagues.
• You can re-use dataset others created
• You can plug collections into databus-ready applications and avoid spending time on the download and setup process
• You can point to a specific piece of data (e.g. for testing) with a single URI in your publications
• You can help others to create data queries more easily

We hope you enjoy the Databus Collection Feature and we would love to hear your feedback! You can leave your thoughts and suggestions in the new DBpedia Forum. Feedback of any kinds is highly appreciated since we want to improve the prototype as fast and user-driven as possible! Cheers!

A big thanks goes to DBpedia developer Jan Forberg who finalized the Databus Collection Feature and compiled this text.

Yours

DBpedia Association

The post New Prototype: Databus Collection Feature appeared first on DBpedia Association.

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,

DBpedia Association

The post GlobalFactSync and WikiDataCon2019 appeared first on DBpedia Association.

Following, we will give you a brief retrospective about the presentations.

Opening Session

Katja Hose – “Querying the web of data”

….on the search for the killer App.

The concept of Linked Open Data and the promise of the Web of Data have been around for over a decade now. Yet, the great potential of free access to a broad range of data that these technologies offer has not yet been fully exploited. This talk will, therefore review the current state of the art, highlight the main challenges from a query processing perspective, and sketch potential ways on how to solve them. Slides are available here.

Dan Weitzner – “timbr-DBpedia – Exploration and Query of DBpedia in SQL”

The timbr SQL Semantic Knowledge Platform enables the creation of virtual knowledge graphs in SQL. The DBpedia version of timbr supports query of DBpedia in SQL and seamless integration of DBpedia data into data warehouses and data lakes. We already published a detailed blogpost about timbr where you can find all relevant information about this amazing new DBpedia Service.

Showcase Session

Maribel Acosta – “A closer look at the changing dynamics of DBpedia mappings”

Her presentation looked at the mappings wiki and how different language chapters use and edit it. Slides are available here.

Mariano Rico – “Polishing a diamond: techniques and results to enhance the quality of DBpedia data”

DBpedia is more than a source for creating papers. It is also being used by companies as a remarkable data source. This talk is focused on how we can detect errors and how to improve the data, from the perspective of academic researchers and but also on private companies. We show the case for the Spanish DBpedia (the second DBpedia in size after the English chapter) through a set of techniques, paying attention to results and further work. Slides are available here.

Guillermo Vega-Gorgojo – “Clover Quiz: exploiting DBpedia to create a mobile trivia game”

Clover Quiz is a turn-based multiplayer trivia game for Android devices with more than 200K multiple choice questions (in English and Spanish) about different domains generated out of DBpedia. Questions are created off-line through a data extraction pipeline and a versatile template-based mechanism. A back-end server manages the question set and the associated images, while a mobile app has been developed and released in Google Play. The game is available free of charge and has been downloaded by +10K users, answering more than 1M questions. Therefore, Clover Quiz demonstrates the advantages of semantic technologies for collecting data and automating the generation of multiple-choice questions in a scalable way. Slides are available here.

Fabian Hoppe and Tabea Tiez – “The Return of German DBpedia”

Fabian and Tabea will present the latest news on the German DBpedia chapter as it returns to the language chapter family after an extended offline period. They will talk about the data set, discuss a few challenges along the way and give insights into future perspectives of the German chapter. Slides are available here.

Wlodzimierz Lewoniewski and Krzysztof Węcel  – “References extraction from Wikipedia infoboxes”

In Wikipedia’s infoboxes, some facts have references, which can be useful for checking the reliability of the provided data. We present challenges and methods connected with the metadata extraction of Wikipedia’s sources. We used DBpedia Extraction Framework along with own extensions in Python to provide statistics about citations in 10 language versions. Provided methods can be used to verify and synchronize facts depending on the quality assessment of sources. Slides are available here.

Wlodzimierz Lewoniewski – “References extraction from Wikipedia infoboxes” … He gave insight into the process of extracting references for Wikipedia infoboxes, which we will use in our GFS project.

Afternoon Session

Sebastian Hellmann, Johannes Frey, Marvin Hofer – “The DBpedia Databus – How to build a DBpedia for each of your Use Cases”

The DBpedia Databus is a platform that is intended for data consumers. It will enable users to build an automated DBpedia-style Knowledge Graph for any data they need. The big benefit is that users not only have access to data, but are also encouraged to apply improvements and, therefore, will enhance the data source and benefit other consumers. We want to use this session to officially introduce the Databus, which is currently in beta and demonstrate its power as a central platform that captures decentrally created client-side value by consumers.  

We will give insight on how the new monthly DBpedia releases are built and validated to copy and adapt for your use cases. Slides are available here.

Interactive session, moderator: Sebastian Hellmann – “DBpedia Connect & DBpedia Commerce – Discussing the new Strategy of DBpedia”

In order to keep growing and improving, DBpedia has been undergoing a growth hack for the last couple of months. As part of this process, we developed two new subdivisions of DBpedia: DBpedia Connect and DBpedia Commerce. The former is a low-code platform to interconnect your public or private databus data with the unified, global DBpedia graph and export the interconnected and enriched knowledge graph into your infrastructure. DBpedia Commerce is an access and payment platform to transform Linked Data into a networked data economy. It will allow DBpedia to offer any data, mod, application or service on the market. During this session, we will provide more insight into these as well as an overview of how DBpedia users can best utilize them. Slides are available here.

In case you missed the event, all slides and presentations are also available on our Website. Further insights, feedback and photos about the event are available on Twitter via #DBpediaDay

We are now looking forward to more DBpedia meetings next year. So, stay tuned and check Twitter, Facebook and the Website or subscribe to our Newsletter for the latest news and information.

If you want to organize a DBpedia Community meeting yourself, just get in touch with us via dbpedia@infai.org regarding program and organization.

Yours

DBpedia Association

The post More than 50 DBpedia enthusiasts joined the Community Meeting in Karlsruhe. appeared first on DBpedia Association.

DBpedia Live is a long term core project of DBpedia that immediately extracts fresh triples from all changed Wikipedia articles. After a long hiatus, fresh and live updated data is available once again, thanks to our former co-worker Lena Schindler whose work we feature in this blog post. Before we dive into Lena’s report, let’s have a look at some general info about DBpedia Live:

• DBpedia Live Website 
• DBpedia Live Changeset Downloads 
• Shared Public DBpedia Live SPARQL Endpoint

Live Enterprise Version

OpenLink Software provides a scalable, dedicated, live Virtuoso instance, built on Lena’s remastering. Kingsley Idehen announced the dedicated business service in our new DBpedia forum. .
On the Databus, we collect publicly shared and business-ready dedicated services in the same place where you can download the data. Databus allows you to download the data, build a service, and offer that service, all in one place. Data up-loaders can also see who builds something with their data

Remastering the DBpedia Live Module

Contribution by Lena Schindler

After developing the DBpedia REST API as part of a student project in 2018, I worked as a student Research Assistant for DBpedia. My task was to analyze and patch severe issues in the DBpedia Live instance. I will shortly describe the purpose of DBpedia Live, the reasons it went out of service, what I did to fix these, and finally, the changes needed to support multi-language abstract extraction.

Overview

The DBpedia Extraction Framework is Scala-based software with numerous features that have evolved around extracting knowledge (as RDF) from Wikis. One part is the DBpedia Live module in the “live-deployed” branch, which is intended to provide a continuously updated version of DBpedia by processing Wikipedia pages on demand, immediately after they have been modified by a user. The backbone of this module is a queue that is filled with recently edited Wikipedia pages, combined with a relational database, called Live Cache, that handles the diff between two consecutive versions of a page. The module that fills the queue, called Feeder, needs some kind of connection to a Wiki instance that reports changes to a Wiki Page. The processing then takes place in four steps: 

1. A wiki page is taken out of the queue. 
2. Triples are extracted from the page, with a given set of extractors. 
3. The new triples from the page are compared to the old triples from the Live Cache.
4. The triple sets that have been deleted and added are published as text files, and the Cache is updated. 

Background

DBpedia Live has been out of service since May 2018, due to the termination of the Wikimedia RCStream Service, upon which the old DBpedia Live Feeder module relied. This socket-based service provided information about changes to an existing Wikimedia instance and was replaced by the EventStreams service, which runs over a single HTTP connection using chunked transfer encoding, and is following the Server-Sent Event (SSE) protocol. It provides a stream of events, each of which contains information about title, id, language, author, and time of every page edit of all Wikimedia instances.

Fix

Starting in September 2018, my first task was to implement a new Feeder for DBpedia Live that is based on this new Wikimedia EventStreams Service. For the Java world, the Akka framework provides an implementation of a SSE client. Akka is a toolkit developed by Lightbend. It simplifies the construction of concurrent and distributed JVM applications, enabling both Java and Scala access. The Akka SSE client and the Akka Streams module are used in the new EventStreamsFeeder (Akka Helper) to extract and process the data stream. I decided to use Scala instead of Java, because it is a more natural fit to Akka. 

After I was able to process events, I had the problem that frequent interruptions in the upstream connection were causing the processing stream to fail. Luckily, Akka provides a fallback mechanism with back-off, similar to the Binary Exponential Backoff of the Ethernet protocol which I could use to restart the stream (called “Graph” in Akka terminology).

Another problem was that in many cases, there were many changes to a page within a short time interval, and if events were processed quickly enough, each change would be processed separately, stressing the Live Instance with unnecessary load. A simple “thread sleep” reduced the number of change-sets being published every hour from thousands to a few hundred.

Multi-language abstracts

The next task was to prepare the Live module for the extraction of abstracts (typically the first paragraph of a page, or the text before the table of contents). The extractors used for this task were re-implemented in 2017. It turned out to be a configuration issue first, and second a candidate for long debugging sessions, fixing issues in the dependencies  between the “live” and “core” modules. Then, in order to allow the extraction of abstracts in multiple languages, the “live” module needed many small changes, at places spread across the code-base, and care had to be taken not to slow down the extraction in the single language case, compared to the performance before the change. Deployment was delayed by an issue with the remote management unit of the production server, but was accomplished by May 2019.

Summary

I also collected my knowledge of the Live module in detailed documentation, addressed to developers who want to contribute to the code. This includes an explanation of the architecture as well as installation instructions. After 400 hours of work, DBpedia Live is alive and kicking, and now supports multi-language abstract extraction. Being responsible for many aspects of Software Engineering, like development, documentation, and deployment, I was able to learn a lot about DBpedia and the Semantic Web, hone new skills in database development and administration, and expand my programming experience using Scala and Akka. 

“Thanks a lot to the whole DBpedia Team who always provided a warm and supportive environment!”

Thank you Lena, it is people like you who help DBpedia improve and develop further, and help to make data networks a reality.

Follow DBpedia on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook and stop by the DBpedia Forum to check out the latest discussions.

Yours DBpedia Association

The post DBpedia Live Restart – Getting Things Done appeared first on DBpedia Association.

How is data edited in Wikipedia/Wikidata? Where does it come from? And how can we synchronize it globally?  

The GlobalFactSync (GFS) Project — funded by the Wikimedia Foundation — started in June 2019 and has two goals:

• Answer the above-mentioned three questions.
• Build an information system to synchronize facts between all Wikipedia language-editions and Wikidata. 

Now we are seven weeks into the project (10+ more months to go) and we are releasing our first prototypes to gather feedback. 

How – Synchronization vs Consensus

We follow an absolute “Human(s)-in-the-loop” approach when we talk about synchronization. The final decision whether to synchronize a value or not should rest with a human editor who understands consensus and the implications. There will be no automatic imports. Our focus is to drastically reduce the time to research all references for individual facts.

A trivial example to illustrate our reasoning is the release date of the single “Boys Don’t Cry” (March 16th, 1989) in the English, Japanese, and French Wikipedia, Wikidata and finally in the external open database MusicBrainz.  A human editor might need 15-30 minutes finding and opening all different sources, while our current prototype can spot differences and display them in 5 seconds.

We already had our first successful edit where a Wikipedia editor fixed the discrepancy with our prototype: “I’ve updated Wikidata so that all five sources are in agreement.” We are now working on the following tasks:

• Scaling the system to all infoboxes, Wikidata and selected external databases (see below on the difficulties there)
• Making the system:
  •  “live” without stale information
  • “reliable” with less technical errors when extracting and indexing data
  • “better referenced” by not only synchronizing facts but also references 

Contributions and Feedback

To ensure that GlobalFactSync will serve and help the Wikiverse we encourage everyone to try our data and micro-services and leave us some feedback, either on our Meta-Wiki page or via email. In the following 10+ months, we intend to improve and build upon these initial results. At the same time, these microservices are available to every developer to exploit it and hack useful applications. The most promising contributions will be rewarded and receive the book “Engineering Agile Big-Data Systems”. Please post feedback or any tool or GUI here. In case you need changes to be made to the API, please let us know, too.
For the ambitious future developers among you, we have some budget left that we will dedicate to an internship. In order to apply, just mention it in your feedback post. 

Finally, to talk to us and other GlobalfactSync-Users you may want to visit WikidataCon and Wikimania, where we will present the latest developments and the progress of our project. 

Data, APIs & Microservices (Technical prototypes) 

Data Processing and Infobox Extraction

For GlobalFactSync we use data from Wikipedia infoboxes of different languages, as well as Wikidata, and DBpedia and fuse them to receive one big, consolidated dataset – a PreFusion dataset (in JSON-LD). More information on the fusion process, which is the engine behind GFS, can be found in the FlexiFusion paper. One of our next steps is to integrate MusicBrainz into this process as an external dataset. We hope to implement even more such external datasets to increase the amount of available information and references. 

First microservices 

We deployed a set of microservices to show the current state of our toolchain.

• [Initial User Interface] The GlobalFactSync UI prototype (available at http://global.dbpedia.org) shows all extracted information available for one entity for different sources. It can be used to analyze the factual consensus between different Wikipedia articles for the same thing. Example: Look at the variety of population counts for Grimma.

• [PreFusion JSON API] While the UI allows simple, fast and easy browsing for one entity at a time, we also provide raw access to the underlying data (PreFusion dump). The query UI (http://global.dbpedia.org:8990 (user: read, pw: gfs) can be utilized to run simple analytical queries. Thus, we can determine the number of locations having at least one population value (1,194,007) but can also focus on examples with data quality problems (e.g. one of the 4,268 locations with more than 10 population values). Moreover, documentation about the PreFusion dataset and the download link for the data are available on the Databus website. 

• [Reference Data Download] We ran the Reference Extraction Service over 10 Wikipedia languages. Download dumps here.

• [Reference Extraction Service] Good references are crucial for an import of facts from Wikipedia to Wikidata. We are currently working with colleagues from Poznań University of Economics and Business on reference extraction for facts from Wikipedia. A current development reference extraction microservice shows all references and the location where they were spotted in the Infobox – ad hoc – for a given article: http://dbpedia.informatik.uni-leipzig.de:8111/infobox/references?article=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook&format=json  ( ‘&format=tsv’ also available) 

• [Infobox Extraction Service] A similar ad hoc extraction of factual information from infoboxes and other Wikipedia article information is available here. This microservice displays information which can be extracted with the help of DBpedia mappings from an infobox e.g. from the German Facebook Wikipedia article: http://dbpedia.informatik.uni-leipzig.de:9998/server/extraction/en/extract?title=Facebook&revid=&format=trix&extractors=mappings. See here for more options: http://dbpedia.informatik.uni-leipzig.de:9999/server/extraction/.

• [ID service] Last but not least, we offer the Global ID Resolution Service. It ties together all available identifiers for one thing (i.e. at the moment all DBpedia/Wikipedia and Wikidata identifiers – MusicBrainz coming soon…) and shows their stable DBpedia Global ID. 

Finding sync targets

In order to test out our algorithms, we started by looking at various groups of subjects, our so-called sync targets. Based on the different subjects a set of problems were identified with varying layers of complexity:

• identity check/check for ambiguity — Are we talking about the same entity? 
• fixed vs. varying property — Some properties vary depending on nationality (e.g., release dates), or point in time (e.g., population count).
• reference — Depending on the entity’s identity check and the property’s fixed or varying state the reference might vary. Also, for some targets, no query-able online reference might be available.
• normalization/conversion of values — Depending on language/nationality of the article properties can have varying units (e.g., currency, metric vs imperial system).

The check for ambiguity is the most crucial step to ensure that the infoboxes that are being compared do refer to the same entity. We found, instances where the Wikipedia page and the infobox shown on that page were presenting information about different subjects (e.g., see here).

Examples

As a good sync target to start with the group ‘NBA players’ was identified. There are no ambiguity issues, it is a clearly defined group of persons, and the amount of varying properties is very limited. Information seems to be derived from mainly two web sites (nba.com and basketball-reference.com) and normalization is only a minor issue. ‘Video games’ also proved to be an easy sync target, with the main problem being varying properties such as different release dates for different platforms (Microsoft Windows, Linux, MacOS X, XBox) and different regions (NA vs EU).

More difficult topics, such as ‘cars’, ’music albums’, and ‘music singles’ showed more potential for ambiguity as well as property variability. A major concern we found was Wikipedia pages that contain multiple infoboxes (often seen for pages referring to a certain type of car, such as this one). Reference and fact extraction can be done for each infobox, but currently, we run into trouble once we fuse this data. 

Further information about sync targets and their challenges can be found on our Meta-Wiki discussion page, where Wikipedians that deal with infoboxes on a regular basis can also share their insights on the matter. Some issues were also found regarding the mapping of properties. In order to make GlobalFactSync as applicable as possible, we rely on the DBpedia community to help us improve the mappings. If you are interested in participating, we will connect with you at http://mappings.dbpedia.org and in the DBpedia forum.  

Bottomline – We value your feedback

Your DBpedia Association

The post Global Fact Sync – Synchronizing Wikidata & Wikipedia’s infoboxes appeared first on DBpedia Association.

In part three of DBpedia’s growth hack blog series, we feature timbr, the latest development at DBpedia in collaboration with WPSemantix. Read on to find out how it works.

timbr – DBpedia SQL Semantic Knowledge Platform

Tel Aviv, Israel and Leipzig, Germany – July 18, 2019 – WP-Semantix (WPS) – the “SQL Knowledge Graph Company” and DBpedia Association – Institut für Angewandte Informatik e.V., announced today the launch of the timbr-DBpedia SQL Semantic Knowledge Platform, a unique version of WPS’ timbr SQL Semantic Knowledge Graph that integrates timbr-DBpedia ontology, timbr’s ontology explorer/visualizer and timbr’s SQL query service, to provide for the first time semantic access to DBpedia knowledge in SQL and to thus facilitate DBpedia knowledge integration into standard data warehouses and data lakes.

DBpedia

DBpedia is the crowd-sourced community effort to extract structured content from the information created in various Wikimedia projects and publish these as files on the Databus and via online databases. This structured information resembles an open knowledge graph which has been available for everyone on the Web for over a decade. Knowledge graphs are a new kind of databases developed to store knowledge in a machine-readable form, organized as connected, relationship-rich data. After the publication of DBpedia (in parallel to Freebase) 12 years ago, knowledge graphs have become very successful and Google uses a similar approach to create the knowledge cards displayed in search results.

Query the world’s knowledge in standard SQL

Amit Weitzner, founder and CEO at WPS commented: “Knowledge graphs use specialized languages, require resource-intensive, dedicated infrastructure and require costly ETL operations. That is, they did until timbr came along. timbr employs SQL – the most widely known database language, to eliminate the technological barriers to entry for using knowledge graphs and to implement Semantic Web principles to provide knowledge graph functionality in SQL. timbr enables modelling of data as connected, context-enriched concepts with inference and graph traversal capabilities while being queryable in standard SQL, to represent knowledge in data warehouses and data lakes. timbr-DBpedia is our first vertical application and we are very excited by the prospects of our cooperation with the DBpedia team to enable the largest user base to query the world’s knowledge in standard SQL.”

Sebastian Hellmann, executive director of the DBpedia Association commented that:

timbr will help to explore the power of semantic technologies

Prof. James Hendler, pioneer and a world-leading authority in Semantic Web technologies and WPS’ advisory board member commented “timbr can be a game-changing solution by enabling the semantic inference capabilities needed in many modelling applications to be done in SQL. This approach will enable many users to get the advantages of semantic AI technologies and data integration without the learning curve of many current systems. By giving more people access to the semantic version of Wikipedia, timbr-DBpedia will definitely contribute to allowing the majority of the market to explore the power of semantic technologies.”

timbr-DBpedia is available as a query service or licensed for use as SaaS or on-premises. See the DBpedia website: wiki.dbpedia.org/timbr.

About WPSemantix

WP-Semantix Ltd. (wpsemantix.com) is the developer of the timbr SQL semantic knowledge platform, a dynamic abstraction layer over relational and non-relational data, facilitating declaration and powerful exploration of semantically rich ontologies using a standard SQL query interface. timbr is natively accessible in Apache Spark, Python, R and SQL to empower data scientists to perform complex analytics and generate sophisticated ML algorithms.  Its JDBC interface provides seamless integration with the most popular business intelligence solutions to make complex analytics accessible to analysts and domain experts across the organization.

WP-Semantix, timbr, “SQL Knowledge Graph”, “SQL Semantic Knowledge Graph” and associated marks and trademarks are registered trademarks of WP Semantix Ltd.

DBpedia is looking forward to this cooperation. Follow us on Twitter for the latest information and stay tuned for part four of our growth hack series. The next post features the GlobalFactSyncRe. Curious? You have to be a little more patient and wait till Thursday, July 25th.

Yours DBpedia Association

The post timbr – the DBpedia SQL Semantic Knowledge Platform appeared first on DBpedia Association.

With part  II of our growth hack series, we would like to introduce you to the latest feature of our development – the new DBpedia Forum.

Why a new forum?

DBpedia has an inclusionist model and DBpedia is huge. At the core, there is data extracted from Wikipedia and Wikidata. Around this, there are derived datasets like the fusion/enrichment and also LHD. Additionally, we offer services such as DBpedia Spotlight, DBpedia Lookup, SameAs, and not to forget the main endpoint http://dbpedia.org/sparql as well as our DBpedia Chapters. All of this is surrounded by 25k academic papers and a vivid business network.

Since we have this inclusionist model, we believe that access to data and knowledge should be global and unified (and free where possible). That is exactly why we established the DBpedia Forum –  to further this mission. 

Welcome!

The DBpedia Forum is a shared community resource — a place to share skills, knowledge, and interests through an ongoing conversation about DBpedia and related topics. It is meant (among others) to replace our old support page for assistance with DBpedia. In the long run, we will shut down our (former) support page, as it is not serving our growing needs anymore. 

Where are all the DBpedians?

We figured, most of you are already actively involved in exchange about DBpedia. However, the majority of that is scattered all over the web which makes it hard for us and others to keep track of. With the new forum, we offer you a playground for vivid exchange, and to meet and greet fellow DBpedians – a platform for everyone’s benefit. 

The DBpedia Forum simplifies communication

Make this a great place for discussion by contributing yourself. It is super easy. Just visit https://forum.dbpedia.org/, browse the topics, and find the info that helps you or add your own. If you want to contribute just register and off you go. Improve the discussion by discovering ones that are already happening. Help us influence the future of the DBpedia community by engaging in discussions that make this forum an interesting place to be. 

Transparency is all

To assist with maintaining an appropriate code of conduct the forum utilizes little discourse tools that enable the community to collectively identify the best (and worst) contributions. The forum tracks bookmarks, likes, flags, replies, edits, and many more. That is similar to the ranking in the old support system but much more transparent and much more fun.

For the hunter-gatherers among you, you can also earn batches for various activities  – as long as you are active.  And if you feel very passionate about a certain topic, we would gladly make you a moderator – just let us know.  

Now is the time

Since you are already talking about DBpedia somewhere on the WWW, why not do it here and now for everyone else to follow? Your knowledge and skills are key, not only for individuals in this forum but also for the whole DBpedia community. 

Happy posting and stay tuned for part III in the growth hack series. The next post will feature timbr – DBpedia SQL Semantic Knowledge Platform.

Yours,

DBpedia Association

The post DBpedia Forum – New Ways to Exchange about DBpedia appeared first on DBpedia Association.

A growth hack – how come?

Things have gone a bit quiet around DBpedia. No new releases, no clear direction to go. Did DBpedia stop? Actually not. There were community and board member meetings, discussions, 500 messages per week on dbpedia.slack.com.

We are still there. We, as a community, restructured and now we are done, which means that DBpedia will now work more focused to build on its Technology Leadership role in the Web of Data and thus – with our very own DBpedia Growth Hack – bring new innovation and free fuel to everybody.

What is this growth hack?

We restructured in two areas:

1. The agility of knowledge delivery –  our release cycle was too slow and too expensive. We were unable to include substantial contributions from DBpedians. Therefore, quality and features stagnated.
2. Transparent processes – DBpedia has a crafty community with highly skilled knowledge engineers backing it. At some point, we grew too much and became lumpy, with a big monolithic system that nobody could improve because of side effects. So we designed a massive curation infrastructure where information can be retrieved, adjusted and errors discussed and fixed.

We have been consistently working on this restructuring for two years now and we now have the infrastructure ready as horizontal prototype meaning each part works and everybody can start using it. We ate our own dog food and built the first application.

(Frey et al. DBpedia FlexiFusion – Best of Wikipedia > Wikidata > Your Data (accepted at ISWC 2019) .

Now we will go through each part and polish & document it, and will report about it with a blog post each.  Stay tuned !

Is DBpedia Academic or Industrial?

The Semantic Web has a history of being labelled as too academic and a part of it colored DBpedia as well. Here is our personal truth: It is an engineering project and therefore it swings both ways. It is a great academic success with 25,000 papers using the data and  enabling research and innovation. The free data drives research on data-driven research. Also, we are probably THE fastest pathway from lab to market as our industry adoption has unprecedented speed. Proof will follow in the blog posts of the Growth Hack series.

Blog Posts of the Growth Hack series:

(not necessarily in that order, depending on how fast we can polish & document )

• Query DBpedia as SQL – a first service on the Databus
• DBpedia Live Extraction – Realtime updates of Wikipedia
• DBpedia Business Models – How to earn money with DBpedia & the Databus
• MARVIN Release Bot – together with https://blogs.tib.eu/wp/tib/ incl. an update of https://wiki.dbpedia.org/Datasets
• The new forum – https://forum.dbpedia.org is already ready to register, but needs some structure. Intended as replacement of support.dbpedia.org

In addition some announcements of on-going projects:

• GlobalFactSync (GFS) – Syncing facts between Wikipedia and Wikidata
• Energy Databus: LOD GEOSS project focusing on energy system data on the bus
• Supply-Chain-Management Databus – PLASS project focusing on SCM data on the bus

So, stay tuned for our upcoming posts and follow our journey.

Yours

DBpedia Association

The post DBpedia Growth Hack – Fall/Winter 2019 appeared first on DBpedia Association.