DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia, and to link other data sets on the Web to Wikipedia data.

The DBpedia Knowledge Base

Knowledge bases are playing an increasingly important role in enhancing the intelligence of Web and enterprise search and in supporting information integration. Today, most knowledge bases cover only specific domains, are created by relatively small groups of knowledge engineers, and are very cost intensive to keep up-to-date as domains change. At the same time, Wikipedia has grown into one of the central knowledge sources of mankind, maintained by thousands of contributors. The DBpedia project leverages this gigantic source of knowledge by extracting structured information from Wikipedia and by making this information accessible on the Web under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and the GNU Free Documentation License.

The DBpedia knowledge base currently describes more than 2.9 million things, including at least 282,000 persons, 339,000 places (including 241,000 populated places), 88,000 music albums, 44,000 films, 15,000 video games, 119,000 organizations (including 20,000 companies and 29,000 educational institutions), 130,000 species and 4400 diseases. The DBpedia knowledge base features labels and abstracts for these things in 91 different languages; 807,000 links to images and 3,840,000 links to external web pages; 4,878,100 external links into other RDF datasets, 415,000 Wikipedia categories, and 75,000 YAGO categories. The knowledge base consists of 479 million pieces of information (RDF triples) out of which 190 million were extracted from the English edition of Wikipedia and 289 million were extracted from other language editions.

The DBpedia knowledge base has several advantages over existing knowledge bases: it covers many domains; it represents real community agreement; it automatically evolve as Wikipedia changes, and it is truly multilingual. The DBpedia knowledge base allows you to ask quite surprising queries against Wikipedia, for instance “Give me all cities in New Jersey with more than 10,000 inhabitants” or “Give me all Italian musicians from the 18th century”. Altogether, the use cases of the DBpedia knowledge base are widespread and range from enterprise knowledge management, over Web search to revolutionizing Wikipedia search.

Nucleus for the Web of Data

Within the W3C Linking Open Data (LOD) community effort, an increasing number of data providers have started to publish and interlink data on the Web according to Tim Berners-Lee’s Linked Data principles. The resulting Web of Data currently consists of several billion RDF triples and covers domains such as geographic information, people, companies, online communities, films, music, books and scientific publications. In addition to publishing and interlinking datasets, there is also ongoing work on Linked Data browsers, Linked Data crawlers, Web of Data search engines and other applications that consume Linked Data from the Web.

The DBpedia knowledge base is served as Linked Data on the Web. As DBpedia defines Linked Data URIs for millions of concepts, various data providers have started to set RDF links from their data sets to DBpedia, making DBpedia one of the central interlinking-hubs of the ermerging Web of Data.

Wiki Contents

This Wiki provides information about the DBpedia community project:

• Datasets gives an overview about the DBpedia knowledge base.
• Ontology gives an overview about the DBpedia ontology.
• Online Access describes how the data set can be accessed via a SPARQL endpoint and as Linked Data.
• Downloads provides the DBpedia data sets for download.
• Interlinking describes how the DBpedia data set is interlinked with various other datasets on the Web.
• Use Cases lists different use cases for the DBpedia data set.
• Extraction Framework describes the DBpedia information extraction framework.
• Data Provision Architecture paints a picture of the software and protocols used to serve DBpedia on the Web.
• Community explains how the DBpedia community collaborates and how people can contribute to the DBpedia effort.
• Credits lists the people and institutions that have contributed to DBpedia so far.
• Next steps describes ideas and future plans for the DBpedia project.

For a recent overview paper about DBpedia, please refer to:

• Christian Bizer, Jens Lehmann, Georgi Kobilarov, Sören Auer, Christian Becker, Richard Cyganiak, Sebastian Hellmann: DBpedia – A Crystallization Point for the Web of Data. Journal of Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, Issue 7, Pages 154–165, 2009.
• Further papers about DBpedia are found at Publications