Mediawiki1: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. The DBpedia knowledge base, which has been created by extracting stuctured information from Wikipedia, currently describes more than 2.9 million things, including at least 282,000 persons, 339,000 places (including 241,000 populated places), 88,000 music albums, 44,000 films, 15,000 video games, 119,000 organizations (including 20,000 companies and 29,000 educational institutions), 130,000 species and 4400 diseases.
About this wiki
DBpedia Mappings
The type of Wikipedia content that is most valuable for the DBpedia extraction are infoboxes and tables. Infoboxes display an article's most relevant facts as a table of attribute-value pairs on the top right-hand side of the Wikipedia page.
As Wikipedia's infobox template system has decentrally envolved over time, different communities of Wikipedia editors use different templates to describe the same type of things (e.g. infobox_city_japan, infobox_swiss_town and infobox_town_de). Different templates use different names for the same attribute (e.g. birthplace and placeofbirth). As many Wikipedia editors do not strictly follow the recommendations given on the page that describes a template, attribute values are expressed using a wide range of different formats and units of measurement.
In order to overcome the problems of synonymous attribute names and multiple templates being used for the same type of things, the DBpedia project maps Wikipedia templates as well as tables within an article to the DBpedia ontology. These mappings are specified using the DBpedia Mapping Language. The mapping language makes use of MediaWiki templates that define DBpedia ontology classes and properties as well as template/table to ontology mappings.
mappings.dbpedia.org
This wiki contains the infobox-to-ontology and the table-to-ontology mappings which are used by the DBpedia extraction framework as well as the ontology definition itself. The framework collects the templates defined in this Wiki and extracts the Wikipedia content according to them (As of March 2010, only the dump extraction uses the mappings. DBpedia Live is going to follow shortly).
Contact
If you have any questions related to DBpedia, this wiki or the DBpedia mapping language, please ask them on the DBpedia mailing list.
