ANN: DBpedia 3.2 release, including DBpedia Ontology and RDF links to Freebase

Hi all,

we are happy to announce the release of DBpedia version 3.2.  

The new knowledge base has been extracted from the October 2008 Wikipedia
dumps. Compared to the last release, the new knowledge base provides three
mayor improvements:


1. DBpedia Ontology

DBpedia now features a shallow, cross-domain ontology, which has been
manually created based on the most commonly used infoboxes within Wikipedia.
The ontology currently covers over 170 classes which form a subsumption
hierarchy and have 940 properties. The ontology is instanciated by a new
infobox data extraction method which is based on hand-generated mappings of
Wikipedia infoboxes to the DBpedia ontology. The mappings define
fine-granular rules on how to parse infobox values. The mappings also adjust
weaknesses in the Wikipedia infobox system, like having different infoboxes
for the same class (currently 350 Wikipedia templates are mapped to 170
ontology classes), using different property names for the same property
(currently 2350 Wikipedia template properties are mapped to 940 ontology
properties), and not having clearly defined datatypes for property values.
Therefore, the instance data within the infobox ontology is much cleaner and
better structured than the infobox data within the DBpedia infobox dataset
that is generated using the old infobox extraction code. The DBpedia
ontology currently contains about 882.000 instances.

More information about the ontology is found at:
http://wiki.dbpedia.org/Ontology 


2. RDF Links to Freebase

Freebase is an open-license database which provides data about million of
things from various domains. Freebase has recently released an Linked Data
interface to their content. As there is a big overlap between DBpedia and
Freebase, we have added 2.4 million RDF links to DBpedia pointing at the
corresponding things in Freebase. These links can be used to smush and fuse
data about a thing from DBpedia and Freebase.

For more information about the Freebase links see:
http://blog.dbpedia.org/2008/11/15/dbpedia-is-now-interlinked-with-freebase-
links-to-opencyc-updated/


3. Cleaner Abstacts

Within the old DBpedia dataset it occurred that the abstracts for different
languages contained Wikpedia markup and other strange characters. For the
3.2 release, we have improved DBpedia's abstract extraction code which
results in much cleaner abstracts that can safely be displayed in user
interfaces. 


The new DBpedia release can be downloaded from:

http://wiki.dbpedia.org/Downloads32

and is also available via the DBpedia SPARQL endpoint at

http://dbpedia.org/sparql

and via DBpedia's Linked Data interface. Example URIs: 

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Berlin
http://dbpedia.org/page/Oliver_Stone

More information about DBpedia in general is found at:

http://wiki.dbpedia.org/About


Lots of thanks to everybody who contributed to the Dbpedia 3.2 release! 

Especially:

1. Georgi Kobilarov (Freie Universität Berlin) who designed and implemented
the new infobox extraction framework. 
2. Anja Jentsch (Freie Universität Berlin) who contributed to implementing
the new extraction framework and wrote the infobox to ontology class
mappings. 
3. Paul Kreis (Freie Universität Berlin) who improved the datatype
extraction code. 
4. Andreas Schultz (Freie Universität Berlin) for generating the Freebase to
DBpedia RDF links.
5. Everybody at OpenLink Software for hosting DBpedia on a Virtuoso server
and for providing the statistics about the new Dbpedia knowledge base.

Have fun with the new DBpedia knowledge base!

Cheers

Chris


--
Prof. Dr. Christian Bizer
Web-based Systems Group
Freie Universität Berlin
+49 30 838 55509
http://www.bizer.de
chris@bizer.de

Received on Monday, 17 November 2008 12:26:56 UTC