(please forward)
Dear all,
we are very happy to announce that we have succeeded in the formation of a new organization to support DBpedia and its community. The DBpedia Association is now officially in action. In the coming months, we hope to raise funding to reach some of the goals outlined in our charter: http://dbpedia.org/association
At the European Data Forum in Athens today and tomorrow, you are able to meet many of the people from the DBpedia Community who have helped to create the DBpedia Association for example Martin Kaltenböck, Michael Martin and Dimitris Kontokostas will be at the the LOD2 Booth at EDF and Asunción Gómez Pérez will be at the LD4LT side event on Friday (Just to name a few)
From September 1st-5th in Leipzig, we hope to gather everyone to celebrate this great achievement. Especially on the 3rd of September, where we will have the 2nd DBpedia Community meeting, which is co-located with the SEMANTiCS 2014 (formerly i-SEMANTICS) on September 4-5.
The people who have all worked together to create this wealth of value under the DBpedia name are so numerous that we are hardly able to know their exact number or all their names. For proper acknowledgement, as a first action the DBpedia Association will start to give out Linked Data URIs during the next months for all its contributors and supporters.
Personally, I am very proud to live in such a great age of collaboration where we are able to work together across borders and institutions.
Hope to see you in person in September or earlier as linked data under the http://dbpedia.org/community/$contributor namespace. Sebastian Hellmann