Freie Universität Berlin has released DBpedia Mobile.  Based on the current GPS position of a mobile device, DBpedia Mobile renders a map containing information about nearby locations from the DBpedia dataset (currently around 300,000 locations). DBpedia Mobile uses the Marbles Linked Data Browser to render Fresnel-based views for selected resources, as well as its SPARQL capabilities to build the map view. Starting from the map, users can explore background information about locations and can navigate into DBpedia and other interlinked datasets such as GeoNames, Revyu, EuroStat and Flickr.

More information about DBpedia Mobile is found on the project website.

Together with this years I-Semantics conference we are organizing a Linking Open Data Triplification Challenge.

The challenge aims at expediting the process of revealing and exposing structured representations, as does the DBpedia project for Wikipedia. Structured (relational) representations already back most of the existing Web sites. In addition to revealing these the challenge also aims at raising awareness in the Web Developer community and showcasing best practices.

The challenge awards attractive prices (MacBook Air, EeePC, iPod) to the most innovative and promising semantifications. The prizes are kindly sponsored by OpenLink Software, Punkt.NetServices and InfAI.

More Information about the challenge can be found at:

http://triplify.org/Challenge

Outreach to the Web developer communities (as intended with the challenge) is really crucial right now to expedite the Semantic Web deployment and we would be very excited if you support this effort - e.g. by spreading the word and/or submitting to the challenge.

DBpedia exposes semantics extracted from one of the largest information sources on the Web. But one of the nice things about the Web is the variety and wealth of content (including your Blog, Wiki, CMS or other WebApp). In order to make this large variety of small Websites better mashable and bring them on the Semantic Web the makers of DBpedia released technologies, which dramatically simplify the “semantification” of your Websites. Please check out Triplify (a generic plugin for Webapps with preconfigurations for Drupal, Wordpress, WackoWiki), D2RQ (a Java software for mapping and serving relational DB content for the Semantic Web) and Virtuoso (a comprehensive DB, knowledge store infrastructure).

As already during the last 4 years we again organize this year a workshop on Scripting for the Semantic Web, co-located on June 1st with European Semantic Web Conference in Tenerife, Spain. Scripting languages as PHP, JavaScript, Ruby etc. will play a crucial role for getting the Semantic Web out on a large scale and most of the really deployed Semantic Web applications (e.g. Semantic MediaWiki, DBpedia, Tabulator etc.) are implemented in scripting languages. The deadline for submitting papers to the workshop is March 7th. The workshop will also include a challenge, which awards an (iPod or the equivalent in cash) to the most promising lightweight Semantic Web Application developed in a scripting language. Details can be found at: http://www.semanticscripting.org/SFSW2008

We announce the availability of the DBpedia 3.0 final release.

Downloads are available at http://wiki.dbpedia.org/Downloads. For a list of changes since DBpedia 2.0, see the Changelog. Most notably, multi-language support was improved, new linked data sets added, and extraction code improved. Compared to the 3.0 release candidate, a number of extraction framework and data set bugs reported at our sourceforge.net bug tracker were fixed.

Overall, the combined download size of all provided NT and CSV files is 5,0 GB (uncompressed: 48,1 GB). The available data sets contain 92M triples (excluding 126M triples for internal Wikipedia links). DBpedia’s coverage grows to 2.4M entities for the English edition in this release, thanks to the hard-working Wikipedia contributors.

The extraction was performed on a server of the AKSW research group. I would like to thank Jörg Schüppel, Sören Auer, Chris Bizer, Richard Cyganiak, Georgi Kobilarov, the OpenLink team, and many other contributors for their DBpedia support.

Sören presented today the paper “DBpedia: A Nucleus for a Web of Open Data” at International Semantic Web Conference in Busan, Korea. You can view the slides at http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~auer/presentations/dbpedia/

The commonsense knowledge base Cyc or OpenCyc (when compared to DBpedia) seems to follow a rather top-down approach – first more abstract concepts and entities are represented and later Cyc started to include also more domain knowledge. This seems to be reasonable, since domain knowledge changes faster and there is much more of it. On the other hand, domain knowledge is usually, what people need to solve real problems within their domains. DBpedia contains primarily domain knowledge, hence a combination of both – Cyc and DBpedia – could really be a winning team.

Together with the committed OpenCyc community we produced a first DBpedia-Cyc linkage, which is now available as a DBpedia dataset from the downloads section. The dataset will soon also be loaded into the DBpedia SPARQL endpoint and made available as linked data. More information about the linkage can be found at: http://wiki.dbpedia.org/OpenCyc

Christian Becker (Freie Universität Berlin) has implemented a wrapper around flickr which generates photo collections depicting DBpedia concepts. See flickr wrappr for details. We have interlinked all DBpedia concepts with the corresponding photo collections. You can now use any Semantic Web browser to navigate from a DBpedia concept to flickr  photos depicting it by following the dbpedia:hasPictureCollection property. This means an additional 30-50 million photos are accessible through DBpedia.

For example, click on the URIs below or paste them into your Semantic Web browser:

Photos depicting Brandenburg Gate: http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/flickrwrappr/photos/Brandenburg_Gate
DBpedia URI for Brandenburg Gate : http://dbpedia.org/resource/Brandenburg_Gate

After quite some work into improving the DBpedia information extraction framework, we have released a new version of the DBpedia dataset today.

The renewed DBpedia dataset describes 1,950,000 “things”, including at least 80,000 persons, 70,000 places, 35,000 music albums, 12,000 films. It contains 657,000 links to images, 1,600,000 links to relevant external web pages and 440,000 external links into other RDF datasets. Altogether, the DBpedia dataset now consists of around 103 million RDF triples.

We worked on improving the data quality in order to make the dataset more usable and useful to developers and fixed a lot of bugs submitted by our growing developer-community. We also reworked our framework to enable developers to extend the dataset with their own extractors.

We are grateful for all contributions and are looking forward to support new projects based on DBpedia data.

The DBpedia Relationship Finder allows you to explore the DBpedia infobox dataset in order to find out which relations exist between two things. It can answer questions like “How are Leipzig and the Semantic Web related?“. The new version includes, amongst other changes, better algorithms and the possibility to ignore objects and properties.