[DL] DBpedia Newsletter

[Sebastian Hellmann]

Dear all,

please find below the first edition of the DBpedia Newsletter, which 
will be sent to all subscribers in a three month interval. Of course, we 
would welcome any people who are interested to sign up 
(_http://eepurl.com/crrrkz_). We decided to use the newsletter as the 
major outlet for updates on DBpedia, so no further Newsletter edition 
will be sent to this list. Smaller and concise announcements will be 
posted on our _blog_ <http://blog.dbpedia.org/>.

Also we would welcome anyone to contribute to the Newsletter with 
DBpedia (and Linked Open Data) related announcements by sending an email 
to _dbpedia at infai.org_ <mailto:dbpedia at infai.org>. Announcement/News can 
include links and should be less than 100 words and are subject to 
moderation and editorial editing (mostly shortening).

Newsletter sign up form:<http://eepurl.com/crrrkz>_http://eepurl.com/crrrkz_

Thank you very much,

Sebastian


    *(Belated) Happy New Year to all DBpedians!*

We are a proud to look retrospectively at a successful year 2016 and 
would like to welcome 2017 with our new newsletter (~4 times per year), 
which will allow you to stay up to date and provide feedback, e.g. via 
the included survey and the planned events in 2017.

*New members *- We kickstarted 
the<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/dbpedia-association>_DBpedia Association_ 
<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/dbpedia-association> with a first wave of new 
members: OpenLink Software, Semantic Web Company, Ontotext, FIZ 
Karlsruhe, Mannheim University, Poznań University of Economics and 
Business, the Business Information Systems Institute Ltd and the Open 
Knowledge Foundation Greece joined the DBpedia Association in 2016. We 
created two web pages that summarize reasons 
to<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/why-is-dbpedia-so-important>_support DBpedia 
via donations_ <http://wiki.dbpedia.org/why-is-dbpedia-so-important> 
and<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/membership>_become a member_ 
<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/membership>.

*DBpedia in Dutch* (_http://nl.dbpedia.org_ <http://nl.dbpedia.org/>) is 
the first chapter which formalized an official DBpedia Chapter 
consortium. The cooperation was initiated by Koninklijke Bibliotheek 
(National Library of the Netherlands) and Huygens ING (research 
institute of History and Culture). Other partners like imec/Ghent 
University, the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision and the 
Network Institute (Vrije Universiteit) joined as well. This cooperation 
will strengthen the DBpedia Dutch chapter and community of contributors 
as well improve the cooperation with the Dutch research infrastructure 
and the Dutch Digital Heritage.

We are in intensive contact with the Japanese, the German and the 
Italian chapters to form official chapters and gain institutional 
support for DBpedia. You would like to know how to start a DBpedia 
chapter? Please check 
here:<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/about/language-chapters>_http://wiki.dbpedia.org/about/language-chapters_

*DBpedia Releases *- Since 2015 we provide bi-annual DBpedia releases. 
The latest 
one,<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/dbpedia-version-2016-04>_2016-04_ 
<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/dbpedia-version-2016-04>, featured a new 
Wikipedia references & citation dataset for the English Wikipedia. In 
addition, we separated the data which we received from heuristic-based 
infobox extractors from the already mapped and quality-controlled data 
to remove low quality data and avoid duplicates & low quality 
information. We improved on 
our<http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/content/wikidata-through-eyes-dbpedia-1>_Wikidata 
extraction_ 
<http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/content/wikidata-through-eyes-dbpedia-1> 
and mapped all our data to Wikidata-based DBpedia IRIs. Wikidata will 
become more and more the core of future extractions.

*Consortium partners for EU and national projects - *Since its 
conception DBpedia has never been funded directly, but was supported 
only by individual tasks in different projects and by the spirit of 
volunteers. With the establishment of the DBpedia Association, we are 
now in a position to receive direct funding and are eligible as a full 
consortium partner for EU and International projects. Furthermore, we 
are able to mediate trusted partners - who have worked with us in the 
past and contributed greatly to DBpedia - for national proposals in over 
30 countries worldwide (contact via reply to this email.)

*Events - *In addition to our participation in the 12th edition of the 
SEMANTiCS, in the 19th International Conference on Business Information 
Systems and in the Google Summer of Code project, we arranged three 
DBpedia community meetings, in The Hague, Leipzig and Sunnyvale, 
California. In order to get updates on our events and projects, stay 
tuned and check the<http://blog.dbpedia.org/>_DBpedia blog_ 
<http://blog.dbpedia.org/>. Please check out the dates to the two new 
DBpedia meetings below.

*Links - *We have revived the portal, that allows the LOD community to 
contribute their links, so we can include them in DBpedia Releases. If 
your database links to DBpedia, you can submit your links 
here:<https://github.com/dbpedia/links>_https://github.com/dbpedia/links_ 
. We provide additional support for this and also provide a service, 
that - once you have contributed your links - will tell you which data 
is linking to your knowledge base via 
DBpedia<http://downloads.dbpedia.org/links/backlinks/>_http://downloads.dbpedia.org/links/backlinks/_, 
available only for Association members.

/We would like to thank again all people who were involved to enable this!/


    *2017 - New Year - New Opportunities*

To make 2017 as great as 2016 we have already reviewed community 
feedback and worked out some plans to bring the DBpedia community closer 
together whereas we attain our goals and follow our visions. Below are 
the most important points for 2017.

*User Survey - *Sören Auer and the DBpedia Board prepared a survey to 
assess the direction of DBpedia and the DBpedia Association. We would 
like to know what you think should be our priorities. Please take a 
minute and vote 
here:<https://goo.gl/forms/NQxrMWskcKlZJAU63>_https://goo.gl/forms/NQxrMWskcKlZJAU63_

*User support *- We set up a new portal to streamline support requests 
for DBpedia. We would encourage you to submit all questions 
to<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/support>_http://wiki.dbpedia.org/support_.

And … if you are already an experienced DBpedia user, you can sign up 
and answer questions and get kudos. Upon request, we can issue a 
certificate for your CV. During the course of 2017 we will also provide 
a priority support channel for members and Chapters.

*Save the Date* *- Galway 21 Jun and Amsterdam 14 Sep*. DBpedia will be 
part of the_Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK) conference_ 
<http://ldk2017.org/> in Galway, Ireland (*Submission open until Feb 
16th*). This new biennial conference series aims at bringing together 
researchers from across disciplines. The DBpedia community will have a 
full day event on 21th of June 2017. Also during 
the<http://2017.semantics.cc/>_SEMANTiCS 2017 in Amsterdam_ 
<http://2017.semantics.cc/>, Sep 11-14 (*Submission open until May 17th 
or June 23rd*), the DBpedia community will get together on the 14th of 
September for a DBpedia community meeting. Updates will be posted in the 
respective<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/events>_events section_ 
<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/events> and the<http://blog.dbpedia.org/>_blog_ 
<http://blog.dbpedia.org/>.

*TextExt: DBpedia’s Open Text Extraction Challenge -* 
(_http://wiki.dbpedia.org/textext_) As DBpedia and Wikidata currently 
focus primarily on representing factual knowledge as contained in 
Wikipedia infoboxes, we created the DBpedia Open Text Extraction 
Challenge. Participants are asked to submit their engines that extract 
facts and knowledge from Wikipedia article texts to dramatically broaden 
and deepen the amount of structured DBpedia/Wikipedia data.

*Community coordination* - *You'd like to get involved in DBpedia? *We 
set up a new Get Involved section. If you are interested in details or 
would like to get in touch with the DBpedia community, please read 
here:<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/get-involved>_http://wiki.dbpedia.org/get-involved_

*Community chairs *- The active community of developers and engineers 
comes together in the DBpedia community committee. We will build up this 
committee with the help of Pablo Mendes and Magnus Knuth who will serve 
as provisional chairs. The committee can be joined by recommendation 
only based on merit. If you would like to get in contact with the 
community committee please check 
here:<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/about/contact>_http://wiki.dbpedia.org/about/contact_

Two delegates from the community committee are elected chairs and will 
take seats at the Board of Trustees. This board is the main 
decision-making body of the DBpedia Association and oversees the 
association and its work, as its ultimate corporate authority. There are 
four board meetings per year, please have a look at the public minutes 
here:<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/board-minutes>_http://wiki.dbpedia.org/board-minutes_

*Technical development I: Wikidata - *Many DBpedians are excited about 
the progress<https://www.wikidata.org/>_Wikidata_ 
<https://www.wikidata.org/> is making and we are planning to use 
Wikidata’s data as the new core for our extraction and fusion. This 
means that in future releases we will fuse data from Wikidata with the 
usual data we extract from over 100 Wikipedia language editions with 
additional data from other high quality LOD sources and do the usual 
refinement, typing and quality-control. We hope that this will provide 
an unprecedented knowledge graph with superior coverage, completeness 
and correctness.

*Technical development II: UnifiedViews - *our plan to achieve the above 
mentioned fusion will be realized by an active collaboration with 
the<https://www.semantic-web.at/>_Semantic Web Company (SWC)_ 
<https://www.semantic-web.at/>, where DBpedia developers work side by 
side with the<http://www.poolparty.biz/>_PoolParty Semantic Suite_ 
<http://www.poolparty.biz/> technical team to add scalability, 
provenance tracking and linking/fusion capabilities into the Data 
Processing Units of 
the<https://www.poolparty.biz/unifiedviews/>_UnifiedViews_ 
<https://www.poolparty.biz/unifiedviews/> workflows.

*Technical development III - *For 2017, we hope to establish further 
hands-on collaboration with companies and organisations to push all 
aspects of DBpedia, in particular: search and visualisation, ontology 
maintenance, querying and indexing crawling data from web and social 
media. We also work together with our members to prioritize on 
integrating data that they think useful.

*Membership* - If you would like to become a member of the DBpedia 
Association, please check all benefits 
here:<http://wiki.dbpedia.org/membership>_http://wiki.dbpedia.org/membership_.

If you require any further information, feel free to contact us by 
replying to this email. We are already very excited to spend time with 
you on further community meetings and to publish new DBpedia releases.

All the best,

Julia, Dimitris & Sebastian

DBpedia Association

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