DBpedia (from "DB" for "

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases s ...

") is a project aiming to extract structured content from the information created in the

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

project. This structured information is made available on the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

. DBpedia allows users to semantically query relationships and properties of Wikipedia resources, including links to other related

dataset A data set (or dataset) is a collection of data. In the case of tabular data, a data set corresponds to one or more database tables, where every column of a table represents a particular variable, and each row corresponds to a given record of the ...

s. In 2008, Tim Berners-Lee described DBpedia as one of the most famous parts of the decentralized

Linked Data In computing, linked data (often capitalized as Linked Data) is structured data which is interlinked with other data so it becomes more useful through semantic queries. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP, RDF and URIs, but ...

effort.

Background

The project was started by people at the

Free University of Berlin The Free University of Berlin (, often abbreviated as FU Berlin or simply FU) is a public research university in Berlin, Germany. It is consistently ranked among Germany's best universities, with particular strengths in political science and t ...

and

Leipzig University Leipzig University (german: Universität Leipzig), in Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, is one of the world's oldest universities and the second-oldest university (by consecutive years of existence) in Germany. The university was founded on 2 December ...

''DBpedia: A Nucleus for a Web of Open Data'', available a

o

/ref> in collaboration with OpenLink Software, and is now maintained by people at the

University of Mannheim The University of Mannheim (German: ''Universität Mannheim''), abbreviated UMA, is a public research university in Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Founded in 1967, the university has its origins in the ''Palatine Academy of Sciences'', ...

and Leipzig University. The first publicly available dataset was published in 2007. The data is made available under

free licence A free license or open license is a license which allows others to reuse another creator’s work as they wish. Without a special license, these uses are normally prohibited by copyright, patent or commercial license. Most free licenses are wo ...

s (

CC-BY-SA A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyrics ...

), allowing others to reuse the dataset; it doesn't however use an

open data Open data is data that is openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shared by anyone for any purpose. Open data is licensed under an open license. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "open(-source)" movement ...

license to waive the

sui generis database right A database right is a ''sui generis'' property right, comparable to but distinct from copyright, that exists to recognise the investment that is made in compiling a database, even when this does not involve the "creative" aspect that is reflecte ...

s. Wikipedia articles consist mostly of free text, but also include structured information embedded in the articles, such as "

infobox An infobox is a digital or physical table used to collect and present a subset of information about its subject, such as a document. It is a structured document containing a set of attribute–value pairs, and in Wikipedia represents a summa ...

" tables (the pull-out panels that appear in the top right of the default view of many Wikipedia articles, or at the start of the mobile versions), categorization information, images,

geo-coordinates The geographic coordinate system (GCS) is a spherical or ellipsoidal coordinate system for measuring and communicating positions directly on the Earth as latitude and longitude. It is the simplest, oldest and most widely used of the various ...

and links to external Web pages. This structured information is extracted and put in a uniform dataset which can be queried.

Dataset

The 2016-04 release of the DBpedia data set describes 6.0 million entities, out of which 5.2 million are classified in a consistent

ontology In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exi ...

, including 1.5 million persons, 810,000 places, 135,000 music albums, 106,000 films, 20,000 video games, 275,000 organizations, 301,000 species and 5,000 diseases. DBpedia uses the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to represent extracted information and consists of 9.5 billion RDF triples, of which 1.3 billion were extracted from the English edition of Wikipedia and 5.0 billion from other language editions. From this data set, information spread across multiple pages can be extracted. For example, book authorship can be put together from pages about the work, or the author. One of the challenges in extracting information from Wikipedia is that the same

concepts Concepts are defined as abstract ideas. They are understood to be the fundamental building blocks of the concept behind principles, thoughts and beliefs. They play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied by s ...

can be expressed using different parameters in infobox and other templates, such as and . Because of this, queries about where people were born would have to search for both of these properties in order to get more complete results. As a result, the DBpedia Mapping Language has been developed to help in mapping these properties to an ontology while reducing the number of synonyms. Due to the large diversity of infoboxes and properties in use on Wikipedia, the process of developing and improving these mappings has been opened to public contributions. Version 2014 was released in September 2014. A main change since previous versions was the way abstract texts were extracted. Specifically, running a local mirror of Wikipedia and retrieving rendered abstracts from it made extracted texts considerably cleaner. Also, a new data set extracted from

Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons (or simply Commons) is a media repository of free-to-use images, sounds, videos and other media. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. Files from Wikimedia Commons can be used across all of the Wikimedia projects in ...

was introduced. As of June 2021, DBPedia contains over a 850 million triples.

Examples

DBpedia extracts factual information from Wikipedia pages, allowing users to find answers to questions where the information is spread across multiple Wikipedia articles. Data is accessed using an SQL-like

query language Query languages, data query languages or database query languages (DQL) are computer languages used to make queries in databases and information systems. A well known example is the Structured Query Language (SQL). Types Broadly, query language ...

for RDF called

SPARQL SPARQL (pronounced " sparkle" , a recursive acronym for SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) is an RDF query language—that is, a semantic query language for databases—able to retrieve and manipulate data stored in Resource Description ...

. For example, if one were interested in the

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

''shōjo'' manga series ''

Tokyo Mew Mew is a Japanese manga series created and written by Reiko Yoshida and illustrated by Mia Ikumi. It was originally serialized in Kodansha's ''shōjo'' manga magazine ''Nakayoshi'' from September 2000 to February 2003, with its chapters co ...

'', and wanted to find the genres of other works written by its illustrator Mia Ikumi. DBpedia combines information from Wikipedia's entries on ''Tokyo Mew Mew'', Mia Ikumi and on works such as ''

Super Doll Licca-chan is a Japanese anime television series which ran on TV Tokyo in 1998–1999. Kodansha also serialized a manga based on the anime series in its monthly manga magazine ''Nakayoshi''. The story follows an ordinary elementary school girl named ...

'' and ''Koi Cupid''. Since DBpedia normalises information into a single database, the followin
query
can be asked without needing to know exactly which entry carries each fragment of information, and will list related genres: PREFIX dbprop: PREFIX db: SELECT ?who, ?WORK, ?genre WHERE

Use cases

DBpedia has a broad scope of entities covering different areas of

human knowledge Knowledge can be defined as Descriptive knowledge, awareness of facts or as Procedural knowledge, practical skills, and may also refer to Knowledge by acquaintance, familiarity with objects or situations. Knowledge of facts, also called pro ...

. This makes it a natural hub for connecting datasets, where external datasets could link to its concepts. The DBpedia dataset is interlinked on the RDF level with various other

Open Data Open data is data that is openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shared by anyone for any purpose. Open data is licensed under an open license. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "open(-source)" movement ...

datasets on the Web. This enables applications to enrich DBpedia data with data from these datasets. , there are more than 45 million interlinks between DBpedia and external datasets including: Freebase,

OpenCyc Cyc (pronounced ) is a long-term artificial intelligence project that aims to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and rules about how the world works. Hoping to capture common sense knowledge, Cyc f ...

UMBEL In botany, an umbel is an inflorescence that consists of a number of short flower stalks (called pedicels) that spread from a common point, somewhat like umbrella ribs. The word was coined in botanical usage in the 1590s, from Latin ''umbella'' "p ...

, GeoNames,

MusicBrainz MusicBrainz is a MetaBrainz project that aims to create a collaborative music database that is similar to the freedb project. MusicBrainz was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the Compact Disc Database (CDDB), a database for so ...

, CIA World Fact Book,

DBLP DBLP is a computer science bibliography website. Starting in 1993 at Universität Trier in Germany, it grew from a small collection of HTML files and became an organization hosting a database and logic programming bibliography site. Since Novem ...

Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital libr ...

, DBtune

Jamendo Jamendo is a Luxembourg-based music website and an open community of independent artists and music lovers. A subsidiary of Belgian company AudioValley, and Independent Management Entity (IME) since 2019. Originally, Jamendo was a music platform ...

, Eurostat,

UniProt UniProt is a freely accessible database of protein sequence and functional information, many entries being derived from genome sequencing projects. It contains a large amount of information about the biological function of proteins derived from ...

, Bio2RDF, and US Census data. The

Thomson Reuters Thomson Reuters Corporation ( ) is a Canadian multinational media conglomerate. The company was founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where it is headquartered at the Bay Adelaide Centre. Thomson Reuters was created by the Thomson Corpora ...

initiative OpenCalais, the Linked Open Data project of ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'', the Zemanta API and

DBpedia Spotlight DBpedia (from "DB" for "database") is a project aiming to extract structured content from the information created in the Wikipedia project. This structured information is made available on the World Wide Web. DBpedia allows users to semantical ...

also include links to DBpedia. The

BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...

...

Background

Dataset

Examples

Use cases

DBpedia Spotlight

Archivo ontology database

History

See also

References

External links