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-N5W3CfLU/edit#heading=h.5lq4jv39ugnh

(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
Homepage: http://aksw.org/SebastianHellmann
Research Group: http://aksw.org