[Wikimedia-l] Semanticpedia : a partnership signed between Wikimédia France, french Ministry of Culture and INRIA

[Adrienne Alix]

[apologies for cross posting]



Hi folks,

On last Monday, 11/19, Wikimedia France had the pleasure to sign an
exceptional partnership with the
French<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Ministry_of_Culture>Ministry
of Culture and Communication<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Ministry_of_Culture>and
INRIA (National
Institute for Research in Computer Science and
Control<http://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/>, 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


-- 
Adrienne Charmet-Alix
Directrice des programmes - Wikimedia France
Twitter : @AdrienneAlix
adrienne.alix at wikimedia.fr | +33 (0)7 62 92 42 01
http://www.wikimedia.fr