beckr.org | Christian Becker » DBpedia

Marbles released on SourceForge

cbecker — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:47:59 +0000

I’m pleased to announce the release of Marbles on SourceForge.

Marbles is a server-side application that formats Semantic Web content for XHTML clients using Fresnel lenses and formats. Colored dots are used to correlate the origin of displayed data with a list of data sources, hence the name.
By performing all formatting, data retrieval and storage activities on the server side rather than on a potentially thinly equipped client, the view generation can touch on large amounts of data and requests can be answered relatively quickly. Marbles provides display and database capabilities for DBpedia Mobile.

Data is retrieved from multiple sources and integrated into a single graph that is persisted across user sessions. When provided with the URI of a resource to display, Marbles tries to dereference it. In parallel, it queries Sindice and Falcons for datasources that contain information about the given resource, and Revyu for reviews. In a similar manner as the Semantic Web Client Library, Marbles follows specific predicates found in retrieved data such as owl:sameAs and rdfs:seeAlso in order to gain more information about a resource and to obtain human-friendly resource labels.

Thanks to Eli Lilly and Company for supporting the open-sourcing of Marbles in part by a research grant.

¡DBpedia @ Wikimania 2009!

cbecker — Fri, 29 May 2009 08:59:58 +0000

This just got in: I will be at Wikmedia’s Wikimania conference in Buenos Aires to talk about DBpedia and an ongoing mapping collaboration. Now on to learning a few bits of Spanish…

BBC interlinks with DBpedia

cbecker — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 08:50:06 +0000

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!

DBpedia Mobile @ LDOW2008

cbecker — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 06:37:25 +0000

I’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:

Website: http://wiki.dbpedia.org/DBpediaMobile
Slides Paper

Update: Another Mashup of the Day at ProgrammableWeb!

flickr™ wrappr

cbecker — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 12:27:44 +0000

DBpedia 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)!