DBpedia

DBpediais a community effort to extract structured information fromWikipediaand to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia and to interlink other datasets on the Web with DBpedia data.

Information about the DBpedia project and dataset can be found here:

• The DBpedia article on Wikipedia
• Project site

DBpedia on MetaWiki

Several pages were created on MetaWiki to aid in extracting information from Wikipedia. Semi-structured information can be found on Wikipedia in articles with infoboxes. The main problem is that infoboxes are generally designed to appeal to human users, when rendered. For machines it is much harder to access the information in infoboxes and extract meaningful and useful data. To ease this process two different pages were created in theUser:DBpedia-Botnamespace:

DBpedia Ontology

TheDBpedia Ontologyaims to be a common scheme for articles (and especially infoboxes of articles) in Wikipedia. It is a repository of unique names and identifiers (vocabulary) for the strings used in infoboxes and aims to merge together what belongs together and separate strings with different meaning.

A simple example: On the English Wikipedia's infoboxes there are 27 different variants ofbirthPlacesuch as birthplace, placeOfBirth, born, which all have the same meaning, i.e. telling the place where a person was born. On the other hand, inWikipedia:Bjorkfor examplebornis used forbirthDateandbirthPlaceat the same time.

TheDBpedia Ontologyprovides a single name for each meaning and thus makes it easier for machines to extract information correctly. Besides names for properties it also contains classes, which provide a strict categorisation system for articles.

More about the ontology can be found on theDBpedia Ontology pageand theOntology overview page.

It adheres to common Semantic Web standards likeRDFandOWL.

DBpedia Mapping

As theDBpedia Ontologyprovides a repository for semantically well-defined identifiers, it is now possible to create amappingfrom infoboxes and templates to the ontology.

Each infobox template (such asWikipedia:Template:Infobox_Musical_artist) can be assigned an OWL class from the ontology. Furthermore, each template parameter (such as Background, Born, Died, Origin) can be mapped to an ontology property.

More information about the can soon be found on themapping page.

Synchronization

The changes made to subpages ofUser:DBpedia-Bot/mappingandUser:DBpedia-Bot/ontology are synchronized with a Semantic Web triple store and take effect within minutes.

The ontology can be downloaded with this link: linkand viewed in standard Ontology editors likeWikipedia:Protégé_(software)