Dear all,
after a long time of refactoring, we are about to start releasing
DBpedia again along with a new mission and identity.
The release notes are here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hv3HCTumKxbaMQe936TyjwAl5_1v6BjYng-N5W3…
(note that we are waiting for the board to give final approval here, but
it should be published this week)
Now, before there are any misconceptions, we would like to get the
Wikidata and DBpedia story a bit straighter:
1. DBpedia isn't really about the data. Data is produced and it is
useful, but the main point was always to push the way knowledge
extraction was done, how data is structured, how data is debugged, how
it is published, maintained, delivered, hosted like
http://fragments.dbpedia.org/ and customised. For example, DBpedia's
CTO Dimitris edited the SHACL (
https://www.w3.org/TR/shacl/) standard
for data constraints, which is now supported by many triplestores and
engines (not sure about neptune or blazegraph, though).
2. The announcement is still missing an acknowledgement section and
instead of moving into any more awkwardness, I would like to include a
statement, that makes clear that the recent advances we made is not
against Wikidata, but because of Wikidata. We clearly see the benefits
of having the well-structured space Wikidata in addition to the 140
Wikipedia language editions. For us it is very good, that you have
star-shaped interlanguage article links instead of spaghetti and also
stable properties and also an edit interface (we had OntoWiki
http://ontowiki.net/ in 2005, but it violates data governance on
extracted data and we will probably never build an edit interface for
the data). So I would like to clearly phrase that the refactoring is
partly driven by the achievements of Wikidata. Partly now only, because
Goal 4 ID Management and Fusion is the step that can be directly traced
to Wikidata' achievements, but it is just a prototype and a Bachelor
thesis now.
All feedback is welcome.
--
All the best,
Sebastian Hellmann
Director of Knowledge Integration and Linked Data Technologies (KILT)
Competence Center
at the Institute for Applied Informatics (InfAI) at Leipzig University
Executive Director of the DBpedia Association
Projects:
http://dbpedia.org,
http://nlp2rdf.org,
http://linguistics.okfn.org,
https://www.w3.org/community/ld4lt
<http://www.w3.org/community/ld4lt>
Homepage:
http://aksw.org/SebastianHellmann
Research Group:
http://aksw.org