Tutorial @  Language, Data and Knowledge conference

On 13th of September, 2023, an exciting tutorial took place at the University of Vienna in the Center for Translation Studies as part of the LDK 2023. The LDK conference focuses on the acquisition, maintenance and use of language data in the context of data science and knowledge-based applications. The tutorial was opened by Milan Dojchinovski (InfAI, DBpedia Association, CTU in Prague). This was followed by three sessions, which were accompanied by many real-world practical use cases, on the DBpedia Knowledge Graph, the infrastructure and the use of the databus data publishing platform. Check more details on our events page. 

DBpedia Day @ SEMANTiCS in Leipzig 

DBpedia Day was once again part of the program at this year’s SEMANTICS conference 2023. It was held on 20th of September at the HYPERION Hotel Leipzig with up to 100 DBpedians. Once again this year, our CEO Sebastian Hellmann opened the day with a presentation of the “DBpedia Databus version 2.1.0”. This was followed by the exciting keynote speech “Towards Foundation Models for Data Spaces” by Edward Curry from the University of Galway, Ireland. Afterwards, we organized the member session and the DBpedia Science Talk session. All slides can also be found on our  events page.

Databus

Databus pre-launch announcement

We are in the final stage of the DBpedia Databus open software release (GitHub). Remaining issues include quality of life and UI improvements. Check out the Databus feature matrix for our lightweight, scalable, adaptable, powerful Data Catalog Platform (direct download link, persistent data identifier on the databus). Contact dbpedia@infai.org for demo, business, or research proposal inquiries.

Databus excels at cataloging de-central data of any filetype using RDF/DCAT. We selected a few initial focal use cases, where the Databus serves as:

1. AIModelHub for AI training data, models, validation, and deployment.
2. Research Data Management Catalog for research institutes and communities.
3. Supply-Chain-Management Platform for product information collection along the supply chain and construction of Digital Product Passports.
4. Community Data Portal, e.g., for the DBpedia Community.

DBpedia Contributions will be enabled soon, taking DBpedia to the moon! 🚀

In DBpedia’s future, the Databus will be used to collect community contributions more effectively, giving DBpedia an enormous boost in quantity and quality. https://databus.dbpedia.org already catalogs over 350k files with over 1 Million file downloads per month!  We are preparing showcases, templates, and documentation for these community contribution types:

1. Community Extensions such as caligraph.org or AI-improved abstracts.
2. Community Link Contributions for inclusion in the main graph.
3. RDF profiles for DBpedia Users and Members (FOAF, Schema.org, WebID) via Databus Accounts (including publication of expertise).
4. Dockerized RDF Tool Deployment so you can automatically load DBpedia and other RDF data into your favorite RDF tools via Databus collections. Our Databus-powered Virtuoso SPARQL Endpoint Quickstart Docker has already been deployed over 150k times! 

We do hope we will meet you and some new faces during our events next year. The association wants to get to know you because DBpedia is a community effort and would not continue to develop, improve and grow without you. We plan to have a tutorial at the LREC-COLING 2024 conference and a meeting at SEMANTiCS, Sep 17-19, 2024, conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Stay safe and check Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn or or subscribe to our Newsletter for the latest news and information.

Yours,

Julia & Maria

on behalf of the DBpedia Association

The post A year with DBpedia – Retrospective Part 2/2023 appeared first on DBpedia Association.

First and foremost, we would like to thank the Institute for Applied Informatics for supporting our community and many thanks to the SEMANTiCS organization team for hosting this year’s community meeting. 

Opening of the DBpedia Day

Also this year, our CEO Sebastian Hellmann opened the community meeting by presenting the Databus 2.1.0 project (slides). Afterwards, Edward Curry from the University of Galway gave his fantastic keynote presentation “Towards Foundation Models for Data Spaces”. You can read his abstract here.

Member Presentation Session

Milan Dojchinovski, InfAI/DBpedia Association and CTU Prague, started the member presentation session with a short welcome. The first speaker was Angel Moreno, GNOSS, with his presentation “NEURALIA Rioja: the unified Knowledge Graph of La Rioja Government which integrates twenty six sources of information in a single access point” (slides). Shortly after, Enno Meijers, KB, talked about “Network-of-Terms, bringing links to your data” (slides). Next, Sarah Binta Alam Shoilee, Network Institute & Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam talked about ”Cultural AI Lab”(slides). This was followed by the presentation “Linking and Consumption of DBpedia in TriplyDB” by Kathrin Dentler & Wouter Beek, TriplyDB (slides). Then Sebastian Gabler, SWC, talked about “Using Dewey Decimal Classification for linked data” (slides). Finally, the last talk of this session was given by  Sebastian Tramp, eccenca, with “Using DBpedia Services with eccenca Corporate Memory and eccenca.my”.

For further details of the presentations follow the links to the slides. 

• “NEURALIA Rioja: the unified Knowledge Graph of La Rioja Government which integrates twenty six sources of information in a single access point” by Angel Moreno, GNOSS (slides)
• “Network-of-Terms, bringing links to your data” by Enno Meijers, KB (slides)
• ”Cultural AI Lab” by Sarah Binta Alam Shoilee, Network Institute & Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (slides)
• “Linking and Consumption of DBpedia in TriplyDB” by Kathrin Dentler & Wouter Beek, TriplyDB (slides)
• “Using Dewey Decimal Classification for linked data” by Sebastian Gabler, SWC (slides)
• “Using DBpedia Services with eccenca Corporate Memory and eccenca.my” by Sebastian Tramp, eccenca (slides)

DBpedia Science: Linking and Consumption

This session was dedicated to the most recent research on linking and consumption of the DBpedia Knowledge Graph and beyond. Novel methods, tools and challenges around linking and consumption of knowledge graphs were presented and discussed. Milan Dojchinovski, InfAI/DBpedia Association and CTU Prague, chaired this session with five talks. Hereafter you will find the presentations given during this session:

• “Open Research Knowledge Graph” by Sören Auer, TIB
• “Blocking Methods for Entity Resolution on Knowledge Graphs” by Daniel Obraczka, Data Science Center ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig (slides)
• “Validating SHACL Constraints with Reasoning: Lessons Learned from DBpedia” by Maribel Acosta, TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology
• “Exploiting Semi-Structured Information in Wikipedia for Knowledge Graph Construction” by Nicolas Heist, Data and Web Science Group, University of Mannheim (slides)
• “Using Pre-trained Language Models for Abstractive DBpedia Summarization” by Hamada Zahera, Data Science Group, Paderborn University (slides)

DBpedia Community session

Sebastian Hellmann, InfAI/DBpedia Association, hosted this year’s community session. DBpedia has had a major impact on data landscape during our 15-year journey. This session discussed the progress of the vision of a “Global and Unified Access to Knowledge Graphs”, which paved the way for an international FAIR Open Data Space driven by knowledge graphs. The session focused on the potential of large-scale knowledge graphs to reshape the open data domain. Topics included how the DBpedia community can pool its data, tools and know-how more effectively, and how we can make these assets more findable, accessible and interoperable. The session provided an insightful discourse on the future of open data and how we can forge strategic alliances across diverse industrial sectors.

Following, you find the presentations of this session: 

• “Update Japanese DBpedia” Hideaki Takeda, LODI (slides)
• Several impulses about different topics and follow-up discussion, moderated by Sebastian Hellmann, InfAI/DBpedia Association (discussion document)

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

We are now looking forward to more DBpedia events in the upcoming months and at next year’s SEMANTiCS Conference, which will be held in Amsterdam, Netherlands.  

Stay safe and check Twitter or LinkedIn. Furthermore, you can subscribe to our Newsletter for the latest news and information around DBpedia.

Maria & Julia

on behalf of the DBpedia Association

The post DBpedia Day in Leipzig @ SEMANTiCS 2023 appeared first on DBpedia Association.

About the National Archives

This article describes the Linked Open Data (LOD) activities of the National Archives of the Netherlands and is based on my presentation at Semantics 2022 in Vienna.

At the National Archives people find information about their lives, Dutch (political/administrative) history and society. Our mission is: “we serve every person’s right to information, and we offer insight into the history of our country.”  The National Archives believes in the power of open data. We want to offer open data as much as possible. Not only to the government and historians but also to third parties which develop new applications and websites. In this way the general public can participate, and new ways of disclosing heritage information can arise. We publish our data (archives, indexes, and photographs) with a CC0 license by, csv, XML and API’s. Below an overview of our overall collection and services.

Linked open data

We are working on the development of Linked Open Data since 2018. Then we started our first LOD experiments and bought an ETL tool to transform our data to RDF. In 2019 we developed an URI strategy and started to model the indexes. We have indexes about enslaved people and slavery, fish rights, emigrants and finance, etc. So we had to develop all kinds of LOD models and use different ontologies. Now we have just finished the publication of our 400,000 digitized pictures with a CC0 license as RDF through our  SPARQL endpoint (Beta). https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/onderzoeken/linked-open-data/sparql-interface

Challenges of linked open data

When transforming to RDF we faced some challenges. For instance the challenge of data quality. We don’t improve the quality of our data. When we want to curate our data we would have to check the original archives. This would take a lot of effort. And what is right or wrong? When a particular archive speaks of “Amsteredam” instead of “Amsterdam”, the record states “Amsteredam” and not Amsterdam, because that is the original spelling  in the archive. Also, within an organization as the National Archives, a lot of stakeholders are involved. IT, Collection, Services, and management. It takes a lot of time and effort to get all the priorities straight.

The Verkaufsbücher

One of our most successful LOD projects is the Verkaufsbücher. This is an administration of the Nazis during World War II in which they wrote the expropriation of Jewish properties in the Netherlands. These houses were “bought” from the Jewish people far under the real price and the owners were often deported shortly afterwards. The National Archives wanted to visualize this story and this data. We worked with the Offices of the land registry of the Netherlands (Kadaster). And developed a data story https://labs.kadaster.nl/stories/verkaufsbucher/index.html. This data story was noticed by a Dutch broadcasting company and issued an item on national television. This broadcast triggered a lot of exposure and the attention of Dutch government agencies and municipalities. Due to this story, local governments have started to investigate what happened with these properties during and directly after the war and some municipalities are going to compensate the victims or their next of kin.

Digital Heritage Network and the Dataset Register

All these LOD developments don’t thrive on their own. Working together with other institutions and professionals is vital. The Dutch Digital Heritage Network is a partnership of cultural heritage agencies in the Netherlands. It focuses on developing a system of national facilities and services for improving the visibility, usability, and sustainability of digital heritage based on linked open data. The network is open to all Dutch institutions and organizations in the digital heritage field.

The Dataset Register is an initiative of the Digital Heritage Network. The National Archives hosts the Dataset Register. This register provides insight into the availability of data sets in the heritage field and thus stimulates the use of these datasets. The Dataset Register makes it easier to publish information about heritage datasets. By analyzing the datasets we can build a knowledge graph on heritage data for better use and the Dataset Register can help software (Google) to find collections.

Heritage institutions are encouraged to make their data sets available, to describe these data sets and to publish them online. Also to submit the URLs of dataset descriptions to the Dataset Register. The Dataset Register retrieves the dataset descriptions, creating an overall picture of what is available. See also https://datasetregister.netwerkdigitaalerfgoed.nl/?lang=en

Drs. Ed de Heer MIM is advisor and project manager for Linked and Open Data at the National Archives and administrator for the Dataset Register. 

The post <strong>LOD activities at the National Archives of the Netherlands</strong> appeared first on DBpedia Association.

DBpedia Day @ Semantics Conference in Vienna

Like last year, the DBpedia Day was part of the SEMANTiCS conference 2022 and was held on 13th of September at the ARCOTEL Wimberger Wien. Up to 100 DBpedians joined the DBpedia Day. Also this year, our CEO Sebastian Hellmann opened DBpedia Day by presenting the Linkmaster 3000 project. Afterwards, Olaf Harting from Linköping University gave his fantastic keynote presentation “Towards Querying Heterogeneous Federations of Interlinked Knowledge Graphs”. Furthermore, we organized a member presentation session, DBpedia Science: Linking and Consumption and a community session. In case you missed the event, all slides are also available on our event page or read our blogpost.

Linkmaster 3000

If it’s not linked — does it even exist? On September 13, 2022, Sebastian Hellmann introduced the Linkmaster 3000 at the SEMANTiCS Conference in Vienna, Austria. It’s an online tool in development to manage Linked Data spaces and help make them better integrated in the global database formed by Linked Data principles. Two milestones are pending: a large-scale evaluation and creation of a documentation for the launch. 

New DBpedia Member

Since 2007, our DBpedia family has been growing steadily – and this year is no exception. We are once again pleased to welcome organizations from science and industry to the DBpedia family. Beginning in February, we were able to welcome Anhalt University of Applied Science into our midst. This was followed in June by the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences (HTWK Leipzig) and the Technical University of Madrid. And last but not least, DALICC joined the DBpedia family in November and has grown it to 34 members.

Right now we are excited to see who will become a new member this year and we are already looking forward to it.

DBpedia Tutorial @ the KGSWC 2022

On November 17, 2022, we organized a free DBpedia Knowledge Graph tutorial at the Knowledge Graph and Semantic Web Confernece (KGSWC) 2022. In this framework this year’s International Winter School was held under the theme “KnowledgeGraphs: Third Wave of AI” in Madrid, Spain. Around 33 participants joined the tutorial, which was organized by Milan Dojchinovski and Jan Forberg. If you want to know more about the tutorial you can find the slides here https://tinyurl.com/WinterSchool22. 

DBpedia Snapshot 2022-09 Release

On October 28, 2022 we announced the immediate availability of a new edition of the free and publicly accessible SPARQL Query Service Endpoint and Linked Data Pages, for interacting with the new Snapshot Dataset. Since the last release we made a few changes. Due to GSoC 2022 (credits to Celian Ringwald) it includes the New Abstract Extractor. In Addition there is still work in progress in order of smoothing the community issue reporting and fixing at Github. The full release description including further statistics can be found on https://www.dbpedia.org/blog/dbpedia-snapshot-2022-09-release/.    

We do hope we will meet you and some new faces during our events next year. The DBpedia Association wants to get to know you because DBpedia is a community effort and would not continue to develop, improve and grow without you. We plan to have meetings or tutorials at the Data Week in Leipzig, the LDK conference, and SEMANTiCS’23 conference. We wish you a happy New Year!

Stay safe and check Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn or or subscribe to our Newsletter for the latest news and information.

Yours,

Emma & Julia

on behalf of the DBpedia Association

The post A year with DBpedia – Retrospective Part 2/2022 appeared first on DBpedia Association.

First and foremost, we would like to thank the Institute for Applied Informatics for supporting our community and many thanks to the SEMANTiCS organization team for hosting this year’s DBpedia Day. 

Opening of the DBpedia Day

Also this year, our CEO Sebastian Hellmann opened DBpedia Day by presenting the Linkmaster 3000 project (slides). Afterwards, Olaf Harting from Linköping University gave his fantastic keynote presentation “Towards Querying Heterogeneous Federations of Interlinked Knowledge Graphs”. If you would like to get more insights, please find his slide deck here.

Member Presentation Session

Gavin Mendel Gleason, TerminusDB, started the DBpedia member presentation session with his presentation “TerminusCMS: the semantically aware & natively versioned content management system”. Shortly after, Susana López-Sola, GNOSS, talked about “Open GNOSS V.5.0: the platform for creating Semantic AI solutions. Everything is interlinked”. Next, Sotiris Karampatakis, Semantic Web Company, talked about “Using PoolParty to provide up-to-date vocabularies to CKAN data portals”. Followed by an online presentation by David Riccitelli, WordLift, presenting the “Making sense of your Knowledge Graph with Google DataStudio”. 

For further details of the presentations follow the links to the slides. 

• “TerminusCMS: the semantically aware & natively versioned content management system” by Gavin Mendel Gleason, TerminusDB (slides)
• “Open GNOSS V.5.0: the platform for creating Semantic AI solutions. Everything is interlinked.” by Susana López-Sola, GNOSS (slides)
• “Using PoolParty to provide up-to-date vocabularies to CKAN data portals.” by Sotiris Karampatakis, Semantic Web Company (slides)
• “Making sense of your Knowledge Graph with Google DataStudio” by David Riccitelli, WordLift (slides)

DBpedia Science: Linking and Consumption

This session was dedicated to the latest research on linking and using the DBpedia Knowledge Graph and beyond. New methods, tools and challenges around knowledge graph linking and usage were presented and discussed. Milan Dojchinovski (InfAI, CTU Prague) chaired this session with five talks. Hereafter you will find the presentations given during this session:

• “Know, Know Where, KnowWhereGraph” by Krzysztof Janowicz, University of Vienna (slides)
• “Fast Hubness-Reduced Nearest Neighbor Search for Entity Alignment in Knowledge Graphs” by Daniel Obraczka, Data Science Center ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig (slides)
• “Open Research Knowledge Graph” by Vinodh Ilangovan, Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology (TIB) (slides)
• “Bootstrapping Knowledge Graphs using DBpedia’s Ecosytem – AKSW.org KG 2.0” by Marvin Hofer, Data Science Center ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig (slides)
• “SDM-RDFizer” by Enrique Iglesias, L3S (slides)

DBpedia Community session

Sebastian Hellmann, InfAI/DBpedia Association, hosted this year’s DBpedia Community Session. Linking data has been heavily researched for decades. The main reason for its popularity is that linking is a necessary condition for use in the sense of discovery (follow links) and integration (use links for data fusion). This session focused on data from specific communities (e.g., national datasets, digital humanities, DBpedia language chapters) so that best practices for discovery, linking, and use can be derived. The three talks were dedicated to this topic.

Following, you find a list of all presentations of this session: 

• “Linking Linked Data – Useful Links” by Sebastian Hellmann, InfAI/DBpedia Association (slides)
• “DBpedia Databus – User-generated Data Catalogues” by Johannes Frey, InfAI/DBpedia Association 
• “Open Data Austria” by Brigitte Barotanyi, Federal Ministry of Labour and Economy (Austria) (slides)

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

We are now looking forward to more DBpedia events in the upcoming months and next year’s SEMANTiCS Conference, which will be held in Leipzig, Germany.  

Stay safe and check Twitter or LinkedIn. Furthermore, you can subscribe to our Newsletter for the latest news and information around DBpedia.

Emma & Julia

on behalf of the DBpedia Association

The post DBpedia Day in Vienna – Servus! 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.

Prior to joining Aalborg University, Katja was a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken. She received her doctoral degree in Computer Science from Ilmenau University of Technology in Germany.

Can you tell us something about your research focus?

The most important focus of my research has been querying the Web of Data, in particular, efficient query processing over distributed knowledge graphs and Linked Data. This includes indexing, source selection, and efficient query execution. Unfortunately, it happens all too often that the services needed to access remote knowledge graphs are temporarily not available, for instance, because a software component crashed. Hence, we are currently developing a decentralized architecture for knowledge sharing that will make access to knowledge graphs a reliable service, which I believe is the key to a wider acceptance and usage of this technology.

How do you personally contribute to the advancement of semantic technologies?

I contribute by doing research, advancing the state of the art, and applying semantic technologies to practical use cases.  The most important achievements so far have been our works on indexing and federated query processing, and we have only recently published our first work on a decentralized architecture for sharing and querying semantic data. I have also been using semantic technologies in other contexts, such as data warehousing, fact-checking, sustainability assessment, and rule mining over knowledge bases.

Overall, I believe the greatest ideas and advancements come when trying to apply semantic technologies to real-world use cases and problems, and that is what I will keep on doing.

Which trends and challenges do you see for linked data and the semantic web?

The goal and the idea behind Linked Data and the Semantic Web is the second-best invention after the Internet. But unlike the Internet, Linked Data and the Semantic Web are only slowly being adopted by a broader community and by industry.

I think part of the reason is that from a company’s point of view, there are not many incentives and added benefit of broadly sharing the achievements. Some companies are simply reluctant to openly share their results and experiences in the hope of retaining an advantage over their competitors. I believe that if these success stories were shared more openly, and this is the trend we are witnessing right now, more companies will see the potential for their own problems and find new exciting use cases.

Another particular challenge, which we will have to overcome, is that it is currently still far too difficult to obtain and maintain an overview of what data is available and formulate a query as a non-expert in SPARQL and the particular domain… and of course, there is the challenge that accessing these datasets is not always reliable.

As artificial intelligence becomes more and more important, what is your vision of AI?

AI and machine learning are indeed becoming more and more important. I do believe that these technologies will bring us a huge step ahead. The process has already begun. But we also need to be aware that we are currently in the middle of a big hype where everybody wants to use AI and machine learning – although many people actually do not truly understand what it is and if it is actually the best solution to their problems. It reminds me a bit of the old saying “if the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail”. Only time will tell us which problems truly require machine learning, and I am very curious to find out which solutions will prevail.

However, the current state of the art is still very far away from the AI systems that we all know from Science Fiction. Existing systems operate like black boxes on well-defined problems and lack true intelligence and understanding of the meaning of the data. I believe that the key to making these systems trustworthy and truly intelligent will be their ability to explain their decisions and their interpretation of the data in a transparent way.

What are your expectations about Semantics 2019 in Karlsruhe?

First and foremost, I am looking forward to meeting a broad range of people interested in semantic technologies. In particular, I would like to get in touch with industry-based research and to be exposed 

The End

We like to thank Katje Hose for her insights and are happy to have her as one of our keynote speakers.

Visit SEMANTiCS 2019 in Karlsruhe, Sep 9-12 and get your tickets for our community meeting here. We are looking forward to meeting you during DBpedia Day.

Yours DBpedia Association

The post SEMANTiCS 2019 Interview: Katja Hose appeared first on DBpedia Association.

Today’s post features an interview with Dan Weitzner from WPSemantix who talks about timbr-DBpedia, which we blogged about recently, as well as future trends and challenges of linked data and the semantic web.

Dan Weitzner is co-founder and Vice President of Research and Development of WPSemantix. He obtained his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Florida Atlantic University. In collaboration with DBpedia, he and his colleagues at WPSemantix launched timbr, the first SQL Semantic Knowledge Graph that integrates Wikipedia and Wikidata Knowledge into SQL engines.

Can you tell us something about your research focus?

WPSemantix bridges the worlds of standard databases and the Semantic Web by creating ontologies accessible in standard SQL. 

Our platform – timbr– is a virtual knowledge graph that maps existing data-sources to abstract concepts, accessible directly in all the popular Business Intelligence (BI) tools and also natively integrated into Apache Spark, R, Python, Java and Scala. 

timbr enables reasoning and inference for complex analytics without the need for costly Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) processes to graph databases.

How do you personally contribute to the advancement of semantic technologies?

We believe we have lowered the fundamental barriers to adoption of semantic technologies for large organizations who want to benefit from knowledge graph capabilities without firstly requiring fundamental changes in their database infrastructure and secondly, without requiring expensive organizational changes or significant personnel retraining.  

Additionally, we implemented the W3C Semantic Web principles to enable inference and inheritance between concepts in SQL, and to allow seamless integration of existing ontologies from OWL. Subsequently, users across organizations can do complex analytics using the same tools that they currently use to access and query their databases, and in addition, to facilitate the sophisticated query of big data without requiring highly technical expertise.  
timbr-DBpedia is one example of what can be achieved with our technology. This joint effort with the DBpedia Association allows semantic SQL query of the DBpedia knowledge graph, and the semantic integration of the DBpedia knowledge into data warehouses and data lakes. Finally, timbr-DBpedia allows organizations to benefit from enriching their data with DBpedia knowledge, combining it with machine learning and/or accessing it directly from their favourite BI tools.Which trends and challenges do you see for linked data and the semantic web?

Currently, the use of semantic technologies for data exploration and data integration is a significant trend followed by data-driven communities. It allows companies to leverage the relationship-rich data to find meaningful insights into their data. 

One of the big difficulties for the average developer and business intelligence analyst is the challenge to learn semantic technologies. Another one is to create ontologies that are flexible and easily maintained. We aim to solve both challenges with timbr.

Which application areas for semantic technologies do you perceive as most promising?

I think semantic technologies will bloom in applications that require data integration and contextualization for machine learning models.

Ontology-based integration seems very promising by enabling accurate interpretation of data from multiple sources through the explicit definition of terms and relationships – particularly in big data systems,  where ontologies could bring consistency, expressivity and abstraction capabilities to the massive volumes of data.As artificial intelligence becomes more and more important, what is your vision of AI?

I envision knowledge-based business intelligence and contextualized machine learning models. This will be the bedrock of cognitive computing as any analysis will be semantically enriched with human knowledge and statistical models.

This will bring analysts and data scientists to the next level of AI.

What are your expectations about Semantics 2019 in Karlsruhe?

I want to share our vision with the semantic community and I would also like to learn about the challenges, vision and expectations of companies and organizations dealing with semantic technologies. I will present “timbr-DBpedia – Exploration and Query of DBpedia in SQL”

The End

Visit SEMANTiCS 2019 in Karlsruhe, Sep 9-12 and find out more about timbr-DBpedia and all the other new developments at DBpedia. Get your tickets for our community meeting here. We are looking forward to meeting you during DBpedia Day.

Yours DBpedia Association

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