[apologies for cross posting]

Hi folks,

On last Monday, 11/19, Wikimedia France had the pleasure to sign an exceptional partnership with the Frenchhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Ministry_of_CultureMinistry of Culture and Communicationhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Ministry_of_Cultureand INRIA (National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Controlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institute_for_Research_in_Computer_Science_and_Control )

This partnership installs Semanticpedia, a platform dedicated to manage some projects about semantization of Wikimedia projects contents : http://semanticpedia.org/

The project began one year ago, by a semantic extraction of the French -language Wikipedia. The project became the french chapter of DBpedia.org < http://dbpedia.org/Internationalization/%3E, which works since 2007 to extract structured content from Wikipedia. What is new? We work directly on the French-language Wikipedia. That allows us to extract *all* the Wikipedia articles and not only the entries with an interwiki with EN Wikipedia. That means that we have between 20 to 30% more articles, which are more reliable with French and French-language culture.

The future of the project may give a semantic extraction of the Wiktionary (+ 2.2 millions entries in French) and why not other Wikimedia projects.

The minister of Culture, Aurélie Filippetti, stressed the importance of a French presence on the web of data, which is becoming increasingly important in many large websites and to connect contents and datas in content and reuse projects. Recalling the importance of Wikipedia, she explained why the Ministry of Culture wanted to support a specific project for linked data resulting indirectly promoting French language and culture on the Internet

But going further, she also invited GLAM institutions to contribute *directly* to Wikipedia, to enrich the content which will be extracted by DBpedia, and widely reused. Advocating a virtuous circle in which institutions could provide their expert participations to Wikipedia and then redistributed to all. This invitation is a real recognition of the position and the quality of Wikipedia and the contributors, and a call for greater participation in sharing knowledge for cultural institutions :

« *The partnership between the Ministry of Culture, Wikimedia France and INRIA offers to cultural institutions the possibility to enrich significantly the cultural resources available to users. In their areas of expertise, cultural institutions have an incentive to reach their audiences where they come to get the basic informations. The free and reusable informations contained on the Wikipedia encyclopedia, available **underseveral open licenses, is in this regard a guarantee of the widest dissemination of the data it contains. * * But this partnership can not be one-sided. Knowledge available on Wikipedia is constantly being built and can fully benefit from the expertise of the Ministry. This is why our institutions are invited to turn to consolidate, enrich or correct if necessary the content on Wikipedia, so not only increase the quality of the articles in French, but its effectiveness in the Semantic Web.* » (Speech of Aurélie Filippetti, Minister of Culture, November 19)

In that partnership the Ministry of Culture takes an important place to support and finance the project. INRIA, well-known research institute, gives the technical development and its experience on semantic web. Wikimédia France provides the links and communication with the community of contributors and brings its knowledge of the Wikimedia projects and their functionning. Now hosted in INRIA, the Semanticpedia platform will be next year hosted by Wikimedia France, with the support of the Ministry of Culture.

Now, some cultural websites start to reuse data from Wikipedia via DBPedia in French and organize their content, as the experimental website HDA-Lab (Ministerial website for pedagogical content about history of art) and the Cité de la Musique.

Wikimedia France is proud to participate to that unprecedented project of partnership between a public Ministry, a research institute and a Wikimedia chapter, project dedicated to sharing of knowledge and openning of data.

See photos of this event on Wikimedia Commons : http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Semanticpedia And the slides of some presentations : http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Semanticpedia_presentation_slides