Friday, October 19, 2007

Dbpedia

I chatted with Duesentrieb the other day. He mentioned dbpedia. I had another look and it is really a great resource. For those that do not know, dbpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web.

It does a great job and it is different from that other project that deals with structured information, Semantic MediaWiki, in that it does operate by data mining information from Wikipedia while Semantic MediaWiki is an integral part of a MediaWiki project.

The great thing of dbpedia is that it explicitly encourages interlinking. With interlinking data, data that can be found in another resource, becomes available limited by the quality of the interface.

You might ask how OmegaWiki fits into all this. Dbpedia's information is in English while OmegaWiki allows for the representation of information in any language . Both OmegaWiki and dbpedia link to Wikipedia articles and consequently where the two share a link, the information can be mashed together.

In Wikiprotein there is a large amount of medical information available. This information does link to external databases. Given that the medical articles relate to external databases, there is an opportunity to link the data to Wikipedia articles. With Wikipedia articles linked in this way, more specialists will find their way to the Wikipedia medical articles and this in turn will make more enriched information available.

The thing to consider now is how OmegaWiki can benefit from dbpedia.. one of the issues is the difference in license. Then again, dbpedia provides its algorithms and consequently the result is not necessarily the license that dbpedia posts.

Thanks,
GerardM

2 comments:

GerardM said...

Duesentrieb says: "I'd like to clarify that Semantic MediaWiki is a add-on/mod that allows/requires people to explicitly input semantic relation, which dbpedia harvests existing info boxes."

PS He asked me to post this for him..
Thanks,
Gerard

Anonymous said...

The issue of how the Semantic Web should interact with thesauruses and knowledge management systems is a very general one and it's being investigated by the SWAD Europe group. Presumably, the OmegaWiki project would cooperate with them so as to promote interoperability and avoid duplication of effort.