We’ve had our first con­tacts with DBPe­dia in May 2010 already. A prospect asked us, whether or not GraphDB is the best way to reflect the data schema and import all data. After get­ting a first impres­sion from the DBPedia-Website:

from www.dbpedia.org/About:

“DBpe­dia is a com­mu­nity effort to extract struc­tured infor­ma­tion from Wikipedia and to make this infor­ma­tion avail­able on the Web. DBpe­dia allows you to ask sophis­ti­cated queries against Wikipedia, and to link other data sets on the Web to Wikipedia data. We hope this will make it eas­ier for the amaz­ing amount of infor­ma­tion in Wikipedia to be used in new and inter­est­ing ways, and that it might inspire new mech­a­nisms for nav­i­gat­ing, link­ing and improv­ing the ency­clopae­dia itself.”

We’ve decided: Yes, it is!.

 from www.dbpedia.org/Datasets:

DBpe­dia uses the Resource Descrip­tion Frame­work (RDF) as a flex­i­ble data model for rep­re­sent­ing extracted infor­ma­tion and for pub­lish­ing it on the Web. We use the SPARQL query lan­guage to query this data. Please refer to the Devel­op­ers Guide to Seman­tic Web Toolk­its to find a devel­op­ment toolkit in your pre­ferred pro­gram­ming lan­guage to process DBpe­dia data.

The DBpe­dia knowl­edge base cur­rently describes more than 3.64 mil­lion things, out of which 1.83 mil­lion are clas­si­fied in a con­sis­tent Ontol­ogy, includ­ing 416,000 per­sons, 526,000 places (includ­ing 360,000 pop­u­lated places), 106,000 music albums, 60,000 films, 17,500 video games, 169,000 orga­ni­za­tions (includ­ing 40,000 com­pa­nies and 38,000 edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions), 183,000 species and 5,400 diseases.

At this time we’ve not yet had too much expe­ri­ences with the Seman­tic Web, there­fore there was prob­a­bly some work to do.

The fol­low­ing blog arti­cles will describe our work and refer to the source-code avail­able under www.github.com/sones/sones-dbpedia