Dear Wikidata Community,
please find below the first edition of the DBpedia Newsletter, which
also tries to raise awareness for Wikidata. We will send these in a
three month intervall to all subscribers (~1900 at the moment) and would
welcome any people who are interested to sign up
(
_http://eepurl.com/crrrkz_). We decided to use the newsletter as the
major outlet for updates on DBpedia, so no further Newsletter edition
will be sent to this list. Smaller and concise announcements will be
posted on our _blog_ <http://blog.dbpedia.org/>.
Newsletter sign up
form:<http://eepurl.com/crrrkz>_http://eepurl.com/crrrkz_
Regarding Wikidata, we would also welcome contributions to the DBpedia
Newsletter that help to further push Wikidata and increase contributions
to your project. Please send us an email to dbpedia(a)infai.org
(Announcement/News can include links and should be less than 100 words)
Thank you very much,
Sebastian
*(Belated) Happy New Year to all DBpedians!*
We are a proud to look retrospectively at a successful year 2016 and
would like to welcome 2017 with our new newsletter (~4 times per year),
which will allow you to stay up to date and provide feedback, e.g. via
the included survey and the planned events in 2017.
*New members *- We kickstarted
the<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/dbpedia-association>_DBpedia Association_
<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/dbpedia-association> with a first wave of new
members: OpenLink Software, Semantic Web Company, Ontotext, FIZ
Karlsruhe, Mannheim University, Poznań University of Economics and
Business, the Business Information Systems Institute Ltd and the Open
Knowledge Foundation Greece joined the DBpedia Association in 2016. We
created two web pages that summarize reasons
to<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/why-is-dbpedia-so-important>_support DBpedia
via donations_ <http://wiki.dbpedia.org/why-is-dbpedia-so-important>
and<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/membership>_become a member_
<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/membership>.
*DBpedia in Dutch* (_http://nl.dbpedia.org_ <http://nl.dbpedia.org/>) is
the first chapter which formalized an official DBpedia Chapter
consortium. The cooperation was initiated by Koninklijke Bibliotheek
(National Library of the Netherlands) and Huygens ING (research
institute of History and Culture). Other partners like imec/Ghent
University, the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision and the
Network Institute (Vrije Universiteit) joined as well. This cooperation
will strengthen the DBpedia Dutch chapter and community of contributors
as well improve the cooperation with the Dutch research infrastructure
and the Dutch Digital Heritage.
We are in intensive contact with the Japanese, the German and the
Italian chapters to form official chapters and gain institutional
support for DBpedia. You would like to know how to start a DBpedia
chapter? Please check
here:<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/about/language-chapters>_http://wiki.db…
*DBpedia Releases *- Since 2015 we provide bi-annual DBpedia releases.
The latest
one,<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/dbpedia-version-2016-04>_2016-04_
<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/dbpedia-version-2016-04>, featured a new
Wikipedia references & citation dataset for the English Wikipedia. In
addition, we separated the data which we received from heuristic-based
infobox extractors from the already mapped and quality-controlled data
to remove low quality data and avoid duplicates & low quality
information. We improved on
our<http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/content/wikidata-through-eyes-db…
extraction_
<http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/content/wikidata-through-eyes-dbpedia-1>
and mapped all our data to Wikidata-based DBpedia IRIs. Wikidata will
become more and more the core of future extractions.
*Consortium partners for EU and national projects - *Since its
conception DBpedia has never been funded directly, but was supported
only by individual tasks in different projects and by the spirit of
volunteers. With the establishment of the DBpedia Association, we are
now in a position to receive direct funding and are eligible as a full
consortium partner for EU and International projects. Furthermore, we
are able to mediate trusted partners - who have worked with us in the
past and contributed greatly to DBpedia - for national proposals in over
30 countries worldwide (contact via reply to this email.)
*Events - *In addition to our participation in the 12th edition of the
SEMANTiCS, in the 19th International Conference on Business Information
Systems and in the Google Summer of Code project, we arranged three
DBpedia community meetings, in The Hague, Leipzig and Sunnyvale,
California. In order to get updates on our events and projects, stay
tuned and check
the<http://blog.dbpedia.org/>_DBpedia blog_
<http://blog.dbpedia.org/>. Please check out the dates to the two new
DBpedia meetings below.
*Links - *We have revived the portal, that allows the LOD community to
contribute their links, so we can include them in DBpedia Releases. If
your database links to DBpedia, you can submit your links
here:<https://github.com/dbpedia/links>_https://github.com/dbpedia/li…
. We provide additional support for this and also provide a service,
that - once you have contributed your links - will tell you which data
is linking to your knowledge base via
DBpedia<http://downloads.dbpedia.org/links/backlinks/>_http://downloa…inks/_,
available only for Association members.
/We would like to thank again all people who were involved to enable this!/
*2017 - New Year - New Opportunities*
To make 2017 as great as 2016 we have already reviewed community
feedback and worked out some plans to bring the DBpedia community closer
together whereas we attain our goals and follow our visions. Below are
the most important points for 2017.
*User Survey - *Sören Auer and the DBpedia Board prepared a survey to
assess the direction of DBpedia and the DBpedia Association. We would
like to know what you think should be our priorities. Please take a
minute and vote
here:<https://goo.gl/forms/NQxrMWskcKlZJAU63>_https://goo.gl/forms/NQxrMWskcKlZJAU63_
*User support *- We set up a new portal to streamline support requests
for DBpedia. We would encourage you to submit all questions
to<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/support>_http://wiki.dbpedia.org/support_pport_.
And … if you are already an experienced DBpedia user, you can sign up
and answer questions and get kudos. Upon request, we can issue a
certificate for your CV. During the course of 2017 we will also provide
a priority support channel for members and Chapters.
*Save the Date* *- Galway 21 Jun and Amsterdam 14 Sep*. DBpedia will be
part of the_Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK) conference_
<http://ldk2017.org/> in Galway, Ireland (*Submission open until Feb
16th*). This new biennial conference series aims at bringing together
researchers from across disciplines. The DBpedia community will have a
full day event on 21th of June 2017. Also during
the<http://2017.semantics.cc/>_SEMANTiCS 2017 in Amsterdam_
<http://2017.semantics.cc/>, Sep 11-14 (*Submission open until May 17th
or June 23rd*), the DBpedia community will get together on the 14th of
September for a DBpedia community meeting. Updates will be posted in the
respective<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/events>_events section_
<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/events> and
the<http://blog.dbpedia.org/>_blog_
<http://blog.dbpedia.org/>.
*TextExt: DBpedia’s Open Text Extraction Challenge -*
(
_http://wiki.dbpedia.org/textext_) As DBpedia and Wikidata currently
focus primarily on representing factual knowledge as contained in
Wikipedia infoboxes, we created the DBpedia Open Text Extraction
Challenge. Participants are asked to submit their engines that extract
facts and knowledge from Wikipedia article texts to dramatically broaden
and deepen the amount of structured DBpedia/Wikipedia data.
*Community coordination* - *You'd like to get involved in DBpedia? *We
set up a new Get Involved section. If you are interested in details or
would like to get in touch with the DBpedia community, please read
here:<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/get-involved>_http://wiki.dbpedia.org/g…
*Community chairs *- The active community of developers and engineers
comes together in the DBpedia community committee. We will build up this
committee with the help of Pablo Mendes and Magnus Knuth who will serve
as provisional chairs. The committee can be joined by recommendation
only based on merit. If you would like to get in contact with the
community committee please check
here:<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/about/contact>_http://wiki.dbpedia.org/…
Two delegates from the community committee are elected chairs and will
take seats at the Board of Trustees. This board is the main
decision-making body of the DBpedia Association and oversees the
association and its work, as its ultimate corporate authority. There are
four board meetings per year, please have a look at the public minutes
here:<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/board-minutes>_http://wiki.dbpedia.org/…
*Technical development I: Wikidata - *Many DBpedians are excited about
the
progress<https://www.wikidata.org/>_Wikidata_
<https://www.wikidata.org/> is making and we are planning to use
Wikidata’s data as the new core for our extraction and fusion. This
means that in future releases we will fuse data from Wikidata with the
usual data we extract from over 100 Wikipedia language editions with
additional data from other high quality LOD sources and do the usual
refinement, typing and quality-control. We hope that this will provide
an unprecedented knowledge graph with superior coverage, completeness
and correctness.
*Technical development II: UnifiedViews - *our plan to achieve the above
mentioned fusion will be realized by an active collaboration with
the<https://www.semantic-web.at/>_Semantic Web Company (SWC)_
<https://www.semantic-web.at/>, where DBpedia developers work side by
side with the<http://www.poolparty.biz/>_PoolParty Semantic Suite_
<http://www.poolparty.biz/> technical team to add scalability,
provenance tracking and linking/fusion capabilities into the Data
Processing Units of
the<https://www.poolparty.biz/unifiedviews/>_UnifiedViews_
<https://www.poolparty.biz/unifiedviews/> workflows.
*Technical development III - *For 2017, we hope to establish further
hands-on collaboration with companies and organisations to push all
aspects of DBpedia, in particular: search and visualisation, ontology
maintenance, querying and indexing crawling data from web and social
media. We also work together with our members to prioritize on
integrating data that they think useful.
*Membership* - If you would like to become a member of the DBpedia
Association, please check all benefits
here:<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/membership>_http://wiki.dbpedia.org/mem…rship_.
If you require any further information, feel free to contact us by
replying to this email. We are already very excited to spend time with
you on further community meetings and to publish new DBpedia releases.
All the best,
Julia, Dimitris & Sebastian
DBpedia Association