Re: Given a university's name, retrieve URL for university's home page.

I'd actually encourage you to use other services, rather than just querying
DBPedia as a single source of truth.

Why not make use of a service like sameas.org to locate candidates:
http://sameas.org/html?q=Cambridge+University&x=-1007&y=-244

... and crawl those/interrogate various data sets via SPARQL to find
instances of a specific University type?


Alternatively, try Freebase's disambiguation control as a good starting
point - I find it more accurate than dbpedia/wikipedia for searching for
the right entity/kind of thing.

Demo:
http://www.freebase.com/ => Enter "Cambridge University", get the top
result of "University of Cambridge", which is a University.

Widget:
https://developers.google.com/freebase/v1/search-widget

You can query freebase via MQL, a javascript flavoured graph query
language, or RDF serialisations of the data (http://basekb.com/ ? I'm sure
there are lots of others too).

Sure, it's not all pure semantic web tooling, but its pretty close - and I
bet there's more interesting problems to solve after disambiguation of
entities :)