The Conference

This new biennial conference series aims at bringing together researchers from across disciplines concerned with language data in data science and knowledge-based applications.

Keynote Speakers

We are happy, that Christian Bizer, a founding member of DBpedia, will be one of the three amazing keynote speakers that open the LDK conference. Apart from Christian, Christiane Fellbaum from Princeton University and  Eduart Werner, representative of Leipzig University will share their thoughts on current language data issues to start vital discussions revolving around language data.

Be part of this event in Leipzig and catch up with the latest research outcomes in the areas of acquisition, provenance, representation, maintenance, usability, quality as well as legal, organizational and infrastructure aspects of language data.  

DBpedia Community Meeting

To get the full Leipzig experience, we also like to invite you to our DBpedia Community meeting, which is colocated with LDK and will be held on May, 23rd 2019. Contributions are still welcome. Just in get in touch via dbpedia@infai.org .

We also offer an interesting side-event, the Thinktank and Hackathon “Artificial Intelligence for Smart Agriculture”. Visit our website for further information.

Join LDK conference 2019 and our DBpedia Community Meeting to catch up with the latest research and developments in the Semantic Web Community. 

Yours DBpedia Association

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Main Event

First and foremost, we would like to thank Apple for the warm welcome and the hosting of the event.

After a Meet & Greet with refreshments, Taylor Rhyne, Eng. Product Manager at Apple, and Pablo N. Mendes, Researcher at Apple and chair of the DBpedia Community Committee, opened the main event with a short introduction setting the tone for the following 2 hours.

The main event attracted attendees with eleven invited talks from major companies of the Bay Area actively using DBpedia or interested in knowledge graphs in general such as Diffbot, IBM, Wikimedia, NTENT, Nuance, Volley and Stardog Union.

Tommaso Soru (University of Leipzig), DBpedia mentor in our Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects, opened the invited talks session with the updates from the DBpedia developer community. This year, DBpedia participated in the GSoC 2017 program with 7 different projects including “First Chatbot for DBpedia”, which was selected as Best DBpedia GSoC Project 2017. His presentation is available here. 

DBpedia likes to thank the following poeple for organizinga nd hosting our Community Meeting in Cupertino, California.

• Pablo N. Mendes (host, program chair), Apple Inc.
• Taylor Rhyne (host), Apple Inc.
• Magnus Knuth, AKSW/KILT
• Filipe Mesquita, diffbot
• Dimitris Kontokostas, DBpedia Chapter Coordinator
• Sebastian Hellmann, AKSW/KILT, DBpedia Association
• Anna Lisa Gentile (IBM Research) and Samuel Goto (Google)

Further Acknowledgments

Invited Talks- A Short Recap

Filipe Mesquita (Diffbot) introduced the new DBpedia NLP Department, born from a recent partnership between our organization and the California based company, which aims at creating the most accurate and comprehensive database of human knowledge. His presentation is available here. Dan Gruhl (IBM Research) held a presentation about the in-house development of an omnilingual ontology and how DBpedia data supported this

endeavor. Stas Malyshev representative for Dario Taraborelli (both Wikimedia Foundation) presented the current state of the structured data initiatives at Wikidata and the query capabilities for Wikidata. Their slides are available here and here. Ricardo Baeza-Yates (NTENT) gave a short talk on mobile semantic search.

The second part of the event saw Peter F. Patel-Schneider (Nuance) holding a presentation with the title “DBpedia from the Fringe” giving some insights on how DBpedia could be further improved. Shortly after, Sebastian Hellmann, Executive Director of the DBpedia Association, walked the stage and presented the state of the art of the association, including achievements and future goals. Sanjay Krishnan (U.C. Berkeley) talked about the link between AlphaGo and data cleansing. You can find his slides here.  Bill Andersen (Volley.com) argued for the use of extremely precise and fine-grained approaches to deal with small data. His presentation is available here. Finally, Michael Grove (Stardog Union) stressed on the view of knowledge graphs as knowledge toolkits backed by a graph data model.

The event concluded with refreshments, snacks and drinks served in the atrium allowing to talk about the presented topics, discuss the latest developments in the field of knowledge graphs and network between all participants. In the end, this closing session was way longer than had been planned.

GSoC Mentor Summit

Shortly after the CA Community Meeting, our DBpedia mentors Tommaso Soru and Magnus Knuth participated at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit held in Sunnyvale California. During free sessions hosted by mentors of diverse open source organizations, Tommaso and Magnus presented selected projects during their lightning talks. Beyond open source, open data topics have been targeted in multiple sessions, as this is not only relevant for research, but there is also a strong need in software projects. The meetings paved the way for new collaborations in various areas, e.g. the field of question answering over the DBpedia knowledge corpus, in particular the use of Neural SPARQL Machines for the translation of natural language into structured queries. We expect that this hot deep-learning topic will be featured in the next edition of GSoC projects. Overall, it has been a great experience to meet so many open source fellows from all over the world.

Upcoming events

After the event is before another ….

Connected Data London, November 16th, 2017.

Sebastian Hellmann, executive director of the DBpedia Association will present Data Quality and Data Usage in a large-scale Multilingual Knowledge Graph during the content track at the Connected Data in London. He will also join the panelists in the late afternoon panel discussion about Linked Open Data: Is it failing or just getting out of the blocks? Feel free to join the event and support DBpedia.

A message for all  DBpedia enthusiasts – our next Community Meeting

Currently we are planning our next Community Meeting  and would like to invite DBpedia enthusiasts and chapters who like to host a meeting to send us their ideas to dbpedia@infai.org. The meeting is scheduled for the beginning of 2018. Any suggestions regarding place, time, program and topics are welcome!  

Check our website for further updates, follow us on #twitter or subscribe to our newsletter.

We will keep you posted

Your DBpedia Association

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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/.

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We are happy to announce Version 0.7 of DBpedia Spotlight, which is also the first official release of the probabilistic/statistical implementation.

More information about as well as updated evaluation results for DBpedia Spotlight V0.7 are found in this paper:

Joachim Daiber, Max Jakob, Chris Hokamp, Pablo N. Mendes: Improving Efficiency and Accuracy in Multilingual Entity Extraction. ISEM2013. 

The changes to the statistical implementation include:

• smaller and faster models through quantization of counts, optimization of search and some pruning
• better handling of case
• various fixes in Spotlight and PigNLProc
• models can now be created without requiring a Hadoop and Pig installation
• UIMA support by @mvnural
• support for confidence value

See the release notes at [1] and the updated demos at [4].

Models for Spotlight 0.7 can be found here [2].

Additionally, we now provide the raw Wikipedia counts, which we hope will prove useful for research and development of new models [3].

A big thank you to all developers who made contributions to this version (with special thanks to Faveeo and Idio). Huge thanks to Jo for his leadership and continued support to the community.

Cheers,
Pablo Mendes,

on behalf of Joachim Daiber and the DBpedia Spotlight developer community.

[1] – https://github.com/dbpedia-spotlight/dbpedia-spotlight/releases/tag/release-0.7

[2] – http://spotlight.sztaki.hu/downloads/

[3] – http://spotlight.sztaki.hu/downloads/raw

[4] – http://dbpedia-spotlight.github.io/demo/

(This message is an adaptation of Joachim Daiber’s message to the DBpedia Spotlight list. Edited to suit this broader community and give credit to him.)

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For the students, it is a great chance to get real-world software development experience. For the open source communities, it is a chance to expand their development community. For everybody else, more source code is created and released for the benefit of all!

We are thrilled to announce that our open source project DBpedia Spotlight has been selected for the Google Summer of Code 2012.

We are now seeking students interested in working with us to enhance operational aspects of DBpedia Spotlight, as well as to engage in research activities in collaboration with our team. If you are an energetic developer, passionate for open source and interested in areas related to DBpedia Spotlight, please get in touch with us!

We have shared a number of project ideas to get you started.

To apply, visit: http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/google/gsoc2012/dbpediaspotlight

If you would like to see DBpedia Spotlight in action, helping you to explore available projects within GSoC 2012, please visit our demonstration page at: http://spotlight.dbpedia.org/gsoc/

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The amount of data in the Linked Open Data cloud is steadily increasing. Interlinking text documents with this data enables the Web of Data to be used as background knowledge within document-oriented applications such as search and faceted browsing. 

DBpedia Spotlight is a tool for annotating mentions of DBpedia resources in text, providing a solution for linking unstructured information sources to the Linked Open Data cloud through DBpedia. The DBpedia Spotlight Architecture is composed by the following modules:

• Web application, a demonstration client (HTML/Javascript UI) that allows users to enter/paste text into a Web browser and visualize the resulting annotated text.

• Web Service, a RESTful Web API that exposes the functionality of annotating and/or disambiguating entities in text. The service returns XML, JSON or RDF.

• Annotation Java / Scala API, exposing the underlying logic that performs the annotation/disambiguation.

• Indexing Java / Scala API, executing the data processing necessary to enable the annotation/disambiguation algorithms used.

More information about DBpedia Spotlight can be found at: 

http://spotlight.dbpedia.org 

DBpedia Spotlight is provided under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0. Part of the code uses LingPipe under the Royalty Free License.

The source code can be downloaded from: 

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dbp-spotlight 

The development of DBpedia Spotlight was supported by: 

• Neofonie GmbH, a Berlin-based company offering leading technologies in the area of Web search, social media and mobile applications (http://www.neofonie.de/).

• The European Commission through the project LOD2 – Creating Knowledge out of Linked Data (http://lod2.eu/). 

Lots of thanks to:

• Andreas Schultz for his help with the SPARQL endpoint.

• Paul Kreis for his help with evaluations.

• Robert Isele and Anja Jentzsch for their help in early stages with the DBpedia extraction framework.

Cheers,

 Pablo N. Mendes, Max Jakob, Andrés García-Silva and Chris Bizer.

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