DBpedia is a crowd-sourced community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to make 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 encyclopedia itself.

The DBpedia Knowledge Base

Knowledge bases are playing an increasingly important role in enhancing the intelligence of Web and enterprise search and in supporting information integration. Today, most knowledge bases cover only specific domains, are created by relatively small groups of knowledge engineers, and are very cost intensive to keep up-to-date as domains change. At the same time, Wikipedia has grown into one of the central knowledge sources of mankind, maintained by thousands of contributors.

The DBpedia project leverages this gigantic source of knowledge by extracting structured information from Wikipedia and by making this information accessible on the Web under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and the GNU Free Documentation License.

The English version of the DBpedia knowledge base currently describes 3.77 million things, out of which 2.35 million are classified in a consistent Ontology, including 764,000 persons, 573,000 places (including 387,000 populated places), 333,000 creative works (including 112,000 music albums, 72,000 films and 18,000 video games), 192,000 organizations (including 45,000 companies and 42,000 educational institutions), 202,000 species and 5,500 diseases.

In addition, we provide localized versions of DBpedia in 111 languages. All these versions together describe 20.8 million things, out of which 10.5 million overlap (are interlinked) with concepts from the English DBpedia. The full DBpedia data set features labels and abstracts for 10.3 million unique things in up to 111 different languages; 8.0 million links to images and 24.4 million HTML links to external web pages; 27.2 million data links into external RDF data sets, 55.8 million links to Wikipedia categories, and 8.2 million YAGO categories. The dataset consists of 1.89 billion pieces of information (RDF triples) out of which 400 million were extracted from the English edition of Wikipedia, 1.46 billion were extracted from other language editions, and about 27 million are data links to external RDF data sets. The Datasets page provides more information about the overall structure of the dataset. Dataset Statistics provides detailed statistics about 22 of the 111 localized versions.

The DBpedia knowledge base has several advantages over existing knowledge bases: it covers many domains; it represents real community agreement; it automatically evolves as Wikipedia changes, and it is truly multilingual. The DBpedia knowledge base allows you to ask quite surprising queries against Wikipedia, for instance Give me all cities in New Jersey with more than 10,000 inhabitants or Give me all Italian musicians from the 18th century. Altogether, the use cases of the DBpedia knowledge base are widespread and range from enterprise knowledge management, over Web search to revolutionizing Wikipedia search.

Nucleus for the Web of Data

Within the  W3C Linking Open Data (LOD) community effort, an increasing number of data providers have started to publish and interlink data on the Web according to Tim Berners-Lees Linked Data principles. The resulting Web of Data currently consists of several billion RDF triples and covers domains such as geographic information, people, companies, online communities, films, music, books and scientific publications. In addition to publishing and interlinking datasets, there is also ongoing work on Linked Data browsers, Linked Data crawlers, Web of Data search engines and other applications that consume Linked Data from the Web.

The DBpedia knowledge base is served as Linked Data on the Web. As DBpedia defines Linked Data URIs for millions of concepts, various data providers have started to set RDF links from their data sets to DBpedia, making DBpedia one of the central interlinking-hubs of the emerging Web of Data.

Wiki Contents

This Wiki provides information about the DBpedia community project:

• Datasets gives an overview about the DBpedia knowledge base.
• Ontology gives an overview about the DBpedia ontology.
• Online Access describes how the data set can be accessed via a SPARQL endpoint and as Linked Data.
• Downloads provides the DBpedia data sets for download.
• Interlinking describes how the DBpedia data set is interlinked with various other datasets on the Web.
• Use Cases lists different use cases for the DBpedia data set.
• Extraction Framework describes the DBpedia information extraction framework.
• Data Provision Architecture paints a picture of the software and protocols used to serve DBpedia on the Web.
• Community explains how the DBpedia community collaborates and how people can contribute to the DBpedia effort.
• DBpedia Mapping Wiki containing the mappings used by the DBpedia extraction.
• DBpedia Internationalization Effort working towards providing multiple language-specific versions of DBpedia.
• DBpedia-Live presents the new DBpedia-Live framework.
• DBpedia Spotlight presents the DBpedia Spotlight tool for the semantic annotation of textual content.
• Credits lists the people and institutions that have contributed to DBpedia so far.
• Next steps describes ideas and future plans for the DBpedia project.

For a recent overview paper about DBpedia, please refer to:

• Christian Bizer, Jens Lehmann, Georgi Kobilarov, Sren Auer, Christian Becker, Richard Cyganiak, Sebastian Hellmann: DBpedia – A Crystallization Point for the Web of Data. Journal of Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, Issue 7, Pages 154165, 2009.
• Further papers about DBpedia are found at Publications