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

1. 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).
2. 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

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

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