The BBC is starting to embrace the Semantic Web. We were recently commissioned to create links between DBpedia and an internal BBC vocabulary, which enable the BBC to use DBpedia/Wikipedia as a controlled vocabulary. This allows them to suggest related content to their users across their multitude of content management systems (we hear there are 36 systems in use at the moment) and better integrate content from the web into their properties. This also means that third parties will gain access to BBC metadata and content in the very near future. Skeptics beware, this is reaching a tipping point!
BBC interlinks with DBpedia
09Sep08DBpedia Mobile @ LDOW2008
23Apr08I’m in Beijing for WWW2008 where I just presented my diploma thesis, DBpedia Mobile at the Linked Data on the Web (LDOW2008) Workshop.
Based on the current GPS position of a mobile device, DBpedia Mobile renders a map containing information about nearby locations from the DBpedia dataset. Geographic locations are currently available for 300,000 of DBpedia’s 2.18 million “things”.
Starting from the map, users can explore background information about locations and can navigate into DBpedia and other interlinked datasets such as GeoNames, Revyu, EuroStat and Flickr.
I will write a bit more about it when I get a chance, but for now here are the slides:
More information:
SlidesUpdate: Another Mashup of the Day at ProgrammableWeb!
flickr™ wrappr
12Oct07DBpedia extracts structured information from Wikipedia and publishes it as RDF. This allows for incredible queries against Wikipedia data, such as Soccer player with tricot nr. 11, playing for a club having a stadium with >40.000 seats, born in a country with >10M inhabitants.
I recently added support for geo-coordinates to DBpedia and built the flickrâ„¢ wrappr, a proof-of-concept work that provides photos for a given Wikipedia article using geo-coordinates and multilingual labels. The benefit: It is a fairly efficient and accurate way for a machine to find a picture of something. It is now part of the W3C SWEO Linking Open Data community project.
I really like the pictures it finds for the Eiffel Tower:
Update (04/10/2008): ReadWriteWeb says "This is pure geek hotness", and Tim Berners-Lee says “This is a neat addition”!
Update: Mashup of the day at ProgrammableWeb (10/17/2007) and at Mashup Awards (01/10/2008)!
