The German federal government has proclaimed Faceted Wikipedia Search as one of the 365 most innovative ideas in Germany in the context of the Deutschland – Land der Ideen competition. The competition showcases innovative ideas in areas such as science and technology, business, education, art and ecology. The patron of the competition is the German President Horst Köhler.

Faceted Wikipedia Search allows users to ask complex queries, like “Which Rivers flow into the Rhine and are longer than 50 kilometers?” or “Which Skyscrapers in China have more than 50 floors and been constructed before 2000?” against Wikipedia. The answers to these queries are not generated based on key word matching as the answers of search engines like Google or Yahoo, but are generated based on structured information that has been extracted from many different Wikipedia articles. Faceted Wikipedia Search allows users to query Wikipedia like a structured database and thus enables them to truly exploit Wikipedia’s collective intelligence.

Faceted Wikipedia Search can be tested online at http://dbpedia.neofonie.de/browse/

Please click on the example queries below to experience Faceted Wikipedia Search in action:

• Rivers that flow into the Rhine and are longer than 50 kilometers
• Japanese cities in the Kansai region with more than 100000 inhabitants
• French scientists who were born in the 19th century
• Skyscrapers in China that have been constructed before 2000 and have more than 50 floors
• Actors of the American TV-series Lost that were born in England
• Endangered Primates

Faceted Wikipedia Search has been jointly developed by neofonie GmbH, Berlin and the Web-based Systems Group at Freie Universität Berlin. Technically Faceted Wikipedia Search is based on the DBpedia data extraction framework and the neofonie search engine. The DBpedia data extraction framework extracts structured information from Wikipedia, such as the content of infoboxes which summarize the relevant facts as a table on the top right-hand side of Wikipedia articles, and represents the extracted data using the Resource Description Framework, a data model for web-based systems. Currently, the framework extracts around 190 million facts from the English editon of Wikipedia and 289 million facts from Wikipedia editions in 90 further languages. The DBpedia data extraction framework is developed by the Web-based Systems group at Freie Universität Berlin and the Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web group at Universität Leizpig. The neofonie search engine is employed to search and navigate the extracted data.

In the context of the W3C Linking Open Data initiative, the DBpedia dataset is currently interlinked with various other open-license databases and is developing into a crystallization point of the emerging Web of Data. In the future, the links between databases will allow applications like Faceted Wikipedia Search to answer queries based not only on Wikipedia knowledge but based on knowledge from a world-wide web of databases.

Faceted Wikipedia Search will be presented as part of the Land der Ideen series on April 12th, 2010 at neofonie, Berlin.

Additional information about the Land der Ideen competition, DBpedia, neofonie and the Web of Data is found at:

• Deutschland – Land der Ideen
• Deutschland – Land der Ideen - Winners 2010
• Deutschland - Land der Ideen - Background information on the 2010 competition
• Press release about Faceted Wikipedia Search (in German)
• DBpedia website
• Neofonie website
• DBpedia – A Crystallization Point for the Web of Data (article)
• Linked Data - The Story so far (article)

Chris Bizer and Christian Becker will be at the MediaWiki Developer Meet-Up  in Berlin this week-end.

So if you are also there and you are interested in DBpedia, just grap us.

If we manage to get hold of the beamer and people are interested, we might also present the following slides

http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/pub/WikiMediaDevMeeting-DBpedia-Talk.pdf

See you at C-Base,

Chris

We are happy to announce that DBpedia Mobile has won the 2nd prize of the Semantic Web Challenge at the 7th International Semantic Web Conference.

DBpedia Mobile is a location-aware client for the Semantic Web that can be used on an iPhone and other mobile devices. Based on the current GPS position of a mobile device, DBpedia Mobile renders a map indicating nearby locations from the DBpedia dataset. Starting from this map, the user can explore background information about his surroundings by navigating along data links into otherWeb data sources. DBpedia Mobile has been designed for the use case of a tourist exploring a city. As the application is not restricted to a xed set of data sources but can retrieve and display data from arbitrary Web data sources, DBpedia Mobile can also be employed within other use cases, including ones unforeseen by its developers. Besides accessing Web data, DBpedia Mobile also enables users to publish their current location, pictures and reviews to the Semantic Web so that they can be used by other Semantic Web applications. Instead of simply being tagged with geographical coordinates, published content is interlinked with a nearby DBpedia resource and thus contributes to the overall richness of the Geospatial Semantic Web.

For more information about DBpedia Mobile please refer to:

• Semantic Web Challenge Submission
• Slides from our presentation at the conference.

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.

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

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/

There will be a talk at the WWW2007 developers track about DBpedia on Friday May 11 (Draft slides)

There will be a F2F meeting of the Linking Open Data project at WWW2007 in Banff, Canada where we will also discuss DBpedia related topics. If you are interested in attending this meeting, just put your name on this wikipage.

There will be a DBpedia Hack Night in Copenhagen on the 24th. Some slides from the event are available here.