DBpedia is a crowd-sourced community effort to extract structured content from the information created in various Wikimedia projects. This structured information resembles an open knowledge graph (OKG) which is available for everyone on the Web. A knowledge graph is a special kind of database which stores knowledge in a machine-readable form and provides a means for information to be collected, organised, shared, searched and utilised. Google uses a similar approach to create those knowledge cards during search. We hope that this work will make it easier for the huge amount of information in Wikimedia projects to be used in some new interesting ways.
DBpedia data is served as Linked Data, which is revolutionizing the way applications interact with the Web. One can navigate this Web of facts with standard Web browsers, automated crawlers or pose complex queries with SQL-like query languages (e.g. SPARQL). Have you thought of asking the Web about all cities with low criminality, warm weather and open jobs? That’s the kind of query we are talking about.
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.