Börtecin Ege wrote an article on the Semantic Web in the December issue of TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) prominently featuring DBpedia, Relfinder, LIMES, SPARQL Benchmark and other AKSW related research projects. See Semantik Web Tübitak Bilim Teknik 12 2011.

The closing ceremony of ISWC2011 in Bonn is just over and we are excited to have won the best research paper award with our paper:

Mohamed Morsey, Jens Lehmann, Sören Auer, Axel Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo: DBpedia SPARQL Benchmark – Performance Assessment with Real Queries on Real Data. To appear in Proceedings of 10th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2011), Oct 23-27, 2011, Bonn, Germany. [BIB]

In the paper we describe on the example of DBpedia how domain-specific SPARQL benchmarks can be generated and used for assessing the performance of triples stores.

Its a great  success for Mohamed Morsey, who did most of the implementation work and is only in the second year of his PhD studies at AKSW.

The AKSW group is pleased to announce the official release of DBpedia Live. The main objective of DBpedia is to extract structured information from Wikipedia, convert it into RDF, and make it freely available on the Web. In a nutshell, DBpedia is the Semantic Web mirror of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia users constantly revise Wikipedia articles with updates happening almost each second. Hence, data stored in the official DBpedia endpoint can quickly become outdated, and Wikipedia articles need to be re-extracted. DBpedia Live enables such a continuous synchronization between DBpedia and Wikipedia. There was a preliminary PHP based DBpedia Live extraction framework available, which was, however, based on an older version of the DBpedia extraction framework and did not contain all necessary features to synchronise properly with Wikipedia.

The DBpedia Live framework has the following new features:

1. Migration to the new Java/Scala DBpedia framework.
2. Support of clean abstract extraction.
3. Automatic reprocessing of all pages affected by a schema mapping change at http://mappings.dbpedia.org.
4. Automatic reprocessing of pages that are not changed for more than one month. The main objective of that feature is to that any change in the DBpedia framework, e.g. addition/change of an extractor, will eventually affect all pages. It also serves as fallback for technical problems in Wikipedia or the update stream.
5. Publication of all changesets.
6. Provision of a tool to enable other DBpedia mirrors to be in synchronization with our DBpedia Live endpoint. The tool continuously downloads changesets and performs changes in a specified triple store accordingly.

Important Links:

• SPARQL-endpoint: http://live.dbpedia.org/sparql
• DBpedia-Live Statistics: http://live.dbpedia.org/livestats
• Changesets: http://live.dbpedia.org/liveupdates
• Sourcecode: http://dbpedia.hg.sourceforge.net/hgweb/dbpedia/extraction_framework
• Synchronization Tool: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dbpintegrator/files/

For further questions, please use the mailing-list at dbpedia-discussion@lists.sourceforge.net. We thank our partners at the FU Berlin and OpenLink for their support.

On June 8, I (Jens) visited the process control engineering research group (PLT) of Leon Urbas at the Dresden University of Technology. We first met on the Leipziger Semantic Web Day where Leon Urbas presented interactive Linked Data applications and decided to have a longer meeting later on. I first gave a talk on the Linked Data Lifecycle (slides as PDF), which is a central element of the vision behind the LOD2 project – a cycle of mutual refinement which can help to overcome some of the problems in using Linked Data. It extends on an earlier vision description by Sören and me.

After the initial presentation, we exchanged ideas for collaboration between our groups. The PLT group has a very strong record in large scale practical applications, mobile devices and usability testing. Since their background is automation engineering, they view semantic technologies as a way to connect large networks of knowledge in a flexible manner. They were particularly interested in some of our research and software tools like LIMES, SAIM and OntoWiki. I enjoyed staying at the group and I am looking forward to further meetings.

Like in the past two years, we again organize a Leipzig Semantic Web Day on May 5th at the marvelous Mediencampus Villa Ida. This year’s theme is “Linked Data  for the Masses”, particularly focusing on its use in enterprises. This event will not only give you the opportunity to discuss current developments around semantic web technologies, but also to get in touch with companies from the German-speaking world. LSWT2011 will have two distinguished keynote speakers: Martin Hepp will share his vision and recent developments around the GoodRelations ecommerce vocabulary with us. The second keynoter Andreas Blumauer from the Semantic Web Company in Vienna will show us how Linked Data can facilitate clean energy.

On the pre-conference day May 4th we will have two tutorials  – an introduction to the Semantic Data Web and another one on the GoodRelations ecommerce vocabulary. Also, on May 4th SoLoMo the Local Media Conference takes place at the Mediencampus, discussing developments around Groupon, Foursquare, Qype, MyHeimat and other local-oriented media.

You can find more information about LSWT at: http://aksw.org/LSWT.

We thank the following LSWT sponsors for their support: