This is a bugfix release with minor enhancements. We fixed some issues from the user community. The most important enhancement is the support for HTTPS now. For a list of all issues, have a look at the Changelog.

We are very pleased to announce that the winners of this years Triplification Challenge were awarded on September 5th at I-Semantics 2008. The winners are:

1st prize (Macbook Air): Linked Movie Data Base
by Oktie Hassanzadeh, Mariano Consens
http://www.linkedmdb.org

2nd prize (eeePC): DBTune by Yves Raimond
http://dbtune.org

3rd prize (iPod): Semantic Web Pipes by Danh Le Phuoc
http://pipes.deri.org

Further information can be found on the Challenge homepage.

Some impressions from the award ceremony at I-Semantics after Tom Heath’s keynote “Humans and the Web of Data” are available at Flickr.

We are very thankful to those nominees who did not win this year. We are also grateful to the Challenge sponsors OpenLink, Punkt.NetServices and InfAI, without the Challenge would not have been possible.

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.

Downloads | ChangeLog

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).