DBpedia is a large source of open knowledge. If you are based nearby Berlin, interested in other open knowledge projects and meeting like-minded people you should consider attending Open Everything Berlin (co-organized by Jonathan Gray and the Open Knowledge Foundation):

After the success of Open Everything London a few weeks ago, there will be an Open Everything Berlin, which will take place in early December. It will be a great opportunity to meet people interested in open knowledge, open source software, and so on. Details are as follows:

• When: Saturday 6th December 2008
• Where: newthinking store, Tucholskystr. 48, Berlin-Mitte (map)
• Programme: http://openeverything.mixxt.de/networks/wiki/index.Programm
• Registration: Attendance is free! Sign up on the mixxt network!

The event will start with a handover from Open Everything Hong Kong and finish with a handover to Open Everything Madison - both of which will also take place on the 6th.

we are happy to announce the release of DBpedia version 3.2.

The new knowledge base has been extracted from the October 2008 Wikipedia dumps. Compared to the last release, the new knowledge base provides three mayor improvements:

1. DBpedia Ontology

DBpedia now features a shallow, cross-domain ontology, which has been manually created based on the most commonly used infoboxes within Wikipedia. The ontology currently covers over 170 classes which form a subsumption hierarchy and have 940 properties. The ontology is instanciated by a new infobox data extraction method which is based on hand-generated mappings of Wikipedia infoboxes to the DBpedia ontology. The mappings define fine-granular rules on how to parse infobox values. The mappings also adjust weaknesses in the Wikipedia infobox system, like having different infoboxes for the same class (currently 350 Wikipedia templates are mapped to 170 ontology classes), using different property names for the same property (currently 2350 template properties are mapped to 940 ontology properties), and not having clearly defined datatypes for properties. Therefore, the instance data within the infobox ontology is much cleaner and better structured than the infobox data within the DBpedia infobox dataset which is generated using the old infobox extraction code. The DBpedia Ontology currently contains about 882.000 instances.

More information about the ontology is found at http://wiki.dbpedia.org/Ontology

2. RDF Links to Freebase

Freebase is an open-license database which provides data about million of things from various domains. Freebase has recently released an Linked Data interface to their content. As there is a big overlap between DBpedia and Freebase, we have added 2.4 million RDF links to DBpedia pointing at the corresponding things in Freebase. These links can be used to smush and fuse data about a thing from DBpedia and Freebase.

For more information about the Freebase links see
http://blog.dbpedia.org/2008/11/15/dbpedia-is-now-interlinked-with-freebase-links-to-opencyc-updated/

3. Cleaner Abstacts

Within the old DBpedia dataset it occurred that the abstracts for different languages contained Wikpedia markup and other strange characters. For the 3.2 release, we have improved DBpedia’s abstract extraction code which results in much cleaner abstracts that can safely be displayed in user interfaces.

Access the new DBpedia knowledge base 

The new DBpedia release can be downloaded from:

http://wiki.dbpedia.org/Downloads32

and is also available via the DBpedia SPARQL endpoint at

http://dbpedia.org/sparql

and via DBpedia’s Linked Data interface. Example URIs:

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Berlin
http://dbpedia.org/page/Oliver_Stone

Lots of thanks to everybody who contributed to the Dbpedia 3.2 release!

Especially:

1. Georgi Kobilarov (Freie Universität Berlin) who designed and implemented the new infobox extraction framework.
2. Anja Jentsch (Freie Universität Berlin) who contributed to implementing the new extraction framework and wrote the infobox to ontology class mappings.
3. Paul Kreis (Freie Universität Berlin) who improved the datatype extraction code.
4. Andreas Schultz (Freie Universität Berlin) for generating the Freebase to DBpedia RDF links.
5. Everybody at OpenLink Software for hosting DBpedia on a Virtuoso server and for providing the statistics about the new Dbpedia knowledge base.

Have fun with the new DBpedia knowledge base!

Freebase is an open-license database which provides data about million of things from various domains. Freebase has recently released an Linked Data interface to their content (See release note). As there is a big overlap between DBpedia and Freebase, we have added 2.4 million RDF links to DBpedia pointing at the corresponding things in Freebase. These links can be used to smush and fuse data about a thing from DBpedia and Freebase. For instance, you can use the Marbles Linked Data browser to view data about the Lord of the Rings from Freebase and DBpedia smushed together.

 We have also updated the the RDF links to OpenCyc, which allow you to use DBpedia instance data together with conceptual knowledge of OpenCyc.

Example Freebase Link

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Woody_Allen owl:sameAs  http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/guid.9202a8c04000641f800000000004064f

Example Open Cyc Link

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Tetris owl:sameAs http://sw.opencyc.org/2008/06/10/concept/Mx4rv9-ZUpwpEbGdrcN5Y29ycA

The links are available via the DBpedia Linked Data interface and via SPARQL endpoint and can also be downloaded as single files:

• Links to Freebase

• Links to OpenCyc

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.

Today, we released DBpedia 3.1. As always in the past years, the size of Wikipedia increased a lot over the past months. The new extraction contains 116,7 million triples, marking an increase of 27% over the previous version.

Apart from the more recent Wikipedia dumps we used, some notable improvements are a much better YAGO mapping, providing a more complete (more classes assigned to instances) and accurate (95% accuracy) class hierarchy for DBpedia. The Geo extractor code has been improved and is now run for all 14 languages. URI validation has switched to the PEAR validation class.

Downloads | ChangeLog

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.