A growth hack – how come?

Things have gone a bit quiet around DBpedia. No new releases, no clear direction to go. Did DBpedia stop? Actually not. There were community and board member meetings, discussions, 500 messages per week on dbpedia.slack.com.

We are still there. We, as a community, restructured and now we are done, which means that DBpedia will now work more focused to build on its Technology Leadership role in the Web of Data and thus – with our very own DBpedia Growth Hack – bring new innovation and free fuel to everybody.

What is this growth hack?

We restructured in two areas:

1. The agility of knowledge delivery –  our release cycle was too slow and too expensive. We were unable to include substantial contributions from DBpedians. Therefore, quality and features stagnated.
2. Transparent processes – DBpedia has a crafty community with highly skilled knowledge engineers backing it. At some point, we grew too much and became lumpy, with a big monolithic system that nobody could improve because of side effects. So we designed a massive curation infrastructure where information can be retrieved, adjusted and errors discussed and fixed.

We have been consistently working on this restructuring for two years now and we now have the infrastructure ready as horizontal prototype meaning each part works and everybody can start using it. We ate our own dog food and built the first application.

(Frey et al. DBpedia FlexiFusion – Best of Wikipedia > Wikidata > Your Data (accepted at ISWC 2019) .

Now we will go through each part and polish & document it, and will report about it with a blog post each.  Stay tuned !

Is DBpedia Academic or Industrial?

The Semantic Web has a history of being labelled as too academic and a part of it colored DBpedia as well. Here is our personal truth: It is an engineering project and therefore it swings both ways. It is a great academic success with 25,000 papers using the data and  enabling research and innovation. The free data drives research on data-driven research. Also, we are probably THE fastest pathway from lab to market as our industry adoption has unprecedented speed. Proof will follow in the blog posts of the Growth Hack series.

Blog Posts of the Growth Hack series:

(not necessarily in that order, depending on how fast we can polish & document )

• Query DBpedia as SQL – a first service on the Databus
• DBpedia Live Extraction – Realtime updates of Wikipedia
• DBpedia Business Models – How to earn money with DBpedia & the Databus
• MARVIN Release Bot – together with https://blogs.tib.eu/wp/tib/ incl. an update of https://wiki.dbpedia.org/Datasets
• The new forum – https://forum.dbpedia.org is already ready to register, but needs some structure. Intended as replacement of support.dbpedia.org

In addition some announcements of on-going projects:

• GlobalFactSync (GFS) – Syncing facts between Wikipedia and Wikidata
• Energy Databus: LOD GEOSS project focusing on energy system data on the bus
• Supply-Chain-Management Databus – PLASS project focusing on SCM data on the bus

So, stay tuned for our upcoming posts and follow our journey.

Yours

DBpedia Association

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