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/DBpedia 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 have been constructed before the year 2000?” against Wikipedia. The answers to these queries are not generated using 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/DBpedia Search allows users to query Wikipedia like a structured database and thus enables them to truly exploit Wikipedia’s collective intelligence.

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

Please click on the example queries below to see 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/DBpedia Search has been jointly developed by neofonie GmbH, Berlin and the Web-based Systems Group at Freie Universität Berlin. Technically, Faceted Wikipedia/DBpedia Search is based on the DBpedia data extraction framework and the neofonie search engine. The DBpedia data extraction framework extracts structured data from Wikipedia, such as the content of infoboxes which summarize relevant facts as a table on the top right-hand side of Wikipedia articles. The extracted data is represented 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 execute complex queries over the extracted data.

As DBpedia covers a wide range of domains and has a high degree of conceptual overlap with various other open-license datasets, an increasing number of data publishers have started to set data-level links from their data sources to DBpedia, making DBpedia one of the cristalization points of the emerging Web of Linked 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 happy to announce the release of DBpedia 3.4. The new release is based on Wikipedia dumps dating from September 2009.

The new DBpedia data set describes more than 2.9 million things, including 282,000 persons, 339,000 places, 88,000 music albums, 44,000 films, 15,000 video games, 119,000 organizations, 130,000 species and 4400 diseases. The DBpedia data set now features labels and abstracts for these things in 91 different languages; 807,000 links to images and 3,840,000 links to external web pages; 4,878,100 external links into other RDF datasets, 415,000 Wikipedia categories, and 75,000 YAGO categories. The data set consists of 479 million pieces of information (RDF triples) out of which 190 million were extracted from the English edition of Wikipedia and 289 million were extracted from other language editions.

The new release provides the following improvements and changes compared to the DBpedia 3.3 release:

1. the data set has been extracted from more recent Wikipedia dumps.
2. the data set now provides labels, abstracts and infobox data in 91 different languages.
3. we provide two different version of the DBpedia Infobox Ontology (loose and strict) in order to meet different application requirements. Please refer to http://wiki.dbpedia.org/Datasets#h18-11 for details.
4. as Wikipedia has moved to dual-licensing, we also dual-license DBpedia. The DBpedia 3.4 data set is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license and the GNU Free Documentation License.
5. the mapping-based infobox data extractor has been improved and now normalizes units of measurement.
6. various bug fixes and improvements throughout the code base. Please refer to the change log for the complete list http://wiki.dbpedia.org/Changelog

You can download the new DBpedia dataset from http://wiki.dbpedia.org/Downloads34. As usual, the dataset is also available as Linked Data and via the DBpedia SPARQL endpoint at http://dbpedia.org/sparql.

Lots of thanks to

• Anja Jentzsch, Christopher Sahnwaldt, Robert Isele, and Paul Kreis (all Freie Universität Berlin) for improving the DBpedia extraction framework and for extracting the new data set.
• Jens Lehmann and Sören Auer (Universität Leipzig) for providing new data set via the DBpedia download server at Universität Leipzig.
• Kingsley Idehen and Mitko Iliev for loading the new data set into the Virtuoso instance that serves the Linked Data view and SPARQL endpoint. OpenLink Software (http://www.openlinksw.com/) altogether for providing the server infrastructure for DBpedia.
• Neofonie GmbH, Berlin, (http://www.neofonie.de/index.jsp) for supporting the DBpedia project by paying Christopher Sahnwaldt.

The next steps for the DBpedia project will be to

1. synchronize Wikipedia and DBpedia by deploying the DBpedia live extraction which updates the DBpedia knowledge base immediately when a Wikipedia article changes.
2. enable the DBpedia user community to edit and maintain the DBpedia ontology and the infobox mappings that are used by the extraction framework in a public Wiki.
3. increase the quality of the extracted data by improving and fine-tuning the extraction code.

All this will hopefully happen soon.

Have fun with the new data set!

Cheers

Chris Bizer

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 pleased to announce the release of DBpedia 3.3. This release is based on Wikipedia dumps of May 2009.

The new release includes the following improvements over DBpedia 3.2:

1. more accurate abstract extraction
2. labels and abstracts in 80 languages
3. several infobox extraction bugfixes
4. new links to Dailymed, Diseasome, Drugbank, Sider, TCM
5. updated Open Cyc links

You can find the datasets here, and the rdf files here. The dataset is available to be queried at our Sparql endpoint.

After eight long months without DBpedia release (due to a lack of Wikipedia dumps), today’s release will bring us up to speed again, and we will release DBpedia datasets much more often in the future.

The 3Sat computer magazine ‘neues‘ has broadcasted a feature about Linked Data and DBpedia and the roles both efforts are playing in the evolution of the Web into a medium for the publication and linkage of data.

See:

• Komplett verlinkt (Description of the broadcast, German)
• Broadcast, 3Sat, 21.6.2009 (German)

Background information:

• DBpedia – A Crystallization Point for the Web of Data. To appear in: Journal of Web Semantics (JWS), Special Issue on the Web of Data.
• Linked Data - The Story So Far. To appear in: Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems (IJSWIS), Special Issue on Linked Data.

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

Kingsley announced on Tuesday that the first of data sets from the LOD community including DBpedia have been uploaded to the Amazon’s public data set hosting facility. Thus you can now do the following:

1. Download DBpedia data from Amazon’s hosting facility at no cost to your own data center and then build your own personal or service specific edition of DBpedia
2. Download to an EC2 AMI and build yourself using Virtuoso or any other Quad / Triple Store
3. Use the DBpedia EC2 AMI which we provide (which will produce a rendition in 1.5 hrs)

We especially thank our colleagues and new Linked Data supporters at both Amazon Web Services and Infochimps.org for their assistance re. getting this very taxing process in motion.

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.