Today, we released DBpedia 3.1. As always in the past years, the size of Wikipedia increased a lot over the past months. The new extraction contains 116,7 million triples, marking an increase of 27% over the previous version. The OpenLink team and the research group around Chris Bizer helped us to produce the release.

Apart from the more recent Wikipedia dumps we used, some notable improvements are a much better YAGO mapping, providing a more complete (more classes assigned to instances) and accurate (95% accuracy) class hierarchy for DBpedia. The Geo extractor code has been improved and is now run for all 14 languages. URI validation has switched to the PEAR validation class.

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After some weeks of silence, Sebastian asked for a pre-release meeting for the 0.2 release of xOperator which we held today. We updated the issue tracker and talked about future plans and ideas. For this, Jörg and Sebastian created presentations:

We plan the xOperator 0.2 release for the last week of August. Overall, this release includes all the features which I’ve presented at the ESWC 2008 Demo session. In addition to this, we will present a web-based configuration tool where users can easily create their own xOperator setup file.

We just released version 0.4 of the Triplify script. After the initial release several months ago we made quite some additions and bug fixes the most important of which are:

• Update log functionality added - allows Semantic Web crawlers to get incremental updates, see http://triplify.org/vocabulary/update
• linked data publication now also works without Apache’s mod_rewrite
• Syntax for indicating objectProperties added, e.g.:SELECT id,user_id 'sioc:has_creator->user'
• Additional metadata can now be added via $triplify[’metadata’]
• The configuration variable $triplify[’CallbackFunctions’] allows programmatic post processing of DB content

Thanks to everybody contributing bug fixes or comments (especially Sebastian Hellmann, Danh Le Phuoc, Rolf Strathewerd, Elias Theodorou).

Out of the submissions for the LOD Triplification Challenge we received eight were nominated to win one of the three prizes. The submissions and demos can be viewed on the challenge nominations page. The final decision about the winners of the challenge will be made by the organizing committee. The prizes will be awarded at I-SEMANTICS 2008, 3–5 September 2008, Graz, Austria.

Please vote for your personal favorite (using the poll widget on the nominations page) and invite your friends and colleagues to do so as well. Although this will not have a formal influence on the committee decision the winner of the community vote will draw more attention and finally earn a honorable mention.

This ParticipatoryResearch initiative launched by AKSW aims at developing and promoting the concept of stakeholder-driven research. Goals are to (1) develop a prediction market model for research funding, (2) implement a Web platform for organising this market and the participatory research process, (3) persuade research funding agencies to use this platform for managing a part of their research portfolio.

A first step towards this goal was made with Cofundos.org – a market for open-source software R&D. The Web site of the ParticipatoryResearch initiative is hosted at: http://wiki.Cofundos.org.