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)

We are pleased to announce the release of the DBpedia Faceted Browser by Jona Christopher Sahnwaldt as well as the DBpedia User Script by Anja Jentzsch.

The DBpedia Faceted Browser allows you to explore Wikipedia via a faceted browsing interface. It supports keyword queries and offers relevant facets to narrow down search results, based on the DBpedia Ontology. In this manner, queries such as “recent films about Buenos Aires” can be easily and intuitively posed against DBpedia.
The DBpedia Faceted browser was developed in cooperation with the search engine company Neofonie, which also kindly provided the funding for this project.

The DBpedia User Script is a Greasemonkey script that enhances Wikipedia pages with a link to their corresponding DBpedia page and can be used within Firefox, Safari and Opera with a suitable Greasemonkey plugin.

Links:

• DBpedia Faceted Browser
• DBpedia User Script

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.

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.

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.

The debug interface allows you to run the current version of the DBpedia extraction code against the live version of Wikipedia. Just enter a page Id like ‘Berlin’ and check what the current code extracts. Please use the debug interface to check if a bug still accures with the current code before reporting the bugs to the DBpedia bug tracker.

The Relationship Finder explores the DBpedia dataset two find out which relations exist between two things. It can answer questions like “How
are Leipzig and the Semantic Web related?“.

The search interface provides free-text search, result classification and display DBpedia data together with data from external sources. A documentation will be added soon. See Developer Blog.

There are two new applications using the DBpedia person data. Essai Timeline by Gautier Poupeau and WikiStory by Pierre Lindenbaum. As both applications are from France, our new French abstracts might be interesting for them.