Wikipedia - semanticweb.com

Wikilinks Corpus: What Will You Do With 40 Million Disambiguated Entity Mentions Across 10 Million-Plus Web Pages?

Jennifer Zaino — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 10:37:48 +0000

Last Friday saw the release of the Wikilinks Corpus from Research at Google, 40 million entities in context strong.

As explained in a blog post by Dave Orr, Amar Subramanya, and Fernando Pereira at Google Research, the Big Data set “involves 40 million total disambiguated mentions within over 10 million web pages — over 100 times bigger than the next largest corpus.” The mentions, the post relates, are found by looking for links to Wikipedia pages where the anchor text of the link closely matches the title of the target Wikipedia page. If each page on Wikipedia is throught of as an entity, then the anchor text can be thought of as a mention of the corresponding entity, it says.

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Wikidata Phase 2 In Full Swing

Jennifer Zaino — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 09:00:17 +0000

In December the Semantic Web Blog spoke with Wikidata project director Denny Vrandecic about progress on Phase 1 of the work to create a free knowledge base about the world that can be read and edited by humans and machines (see story here). At the time, Vrandecic explained that January would begin the roll-out of language-by-language editions – first up were Hungarian, Hebrew and Italian – on the Wikipedias.

Last week brought another language on board, as Wikidata Phase 1 went live on English Wikipedia, with Wikidata language links supplementing locally-hosted ones there too. March 6 should see deployment to the Wikipedias that do not have language links.

In an important update, Phase 2 of the overall effort to centralize access to and management of structured data – which was in development as Phase 1 progressed – saw its first fruits for use on Wikidata.org (not yet on Wikipedia) earlier this month: Infoboxes.

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Wikidata: People And Bots Busy Filling The System In Phase One

Jennifer Zaino — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 16:36:19 +0000

Ever heard of the Finnish television series Matkaoppaat? It’s a program about tour guides abroad – something of a reality show that looks like it has already spawned copycat programs with more on the way in other countries.

But of more interest to readers of The Semantic Web Blog is that just a couple of days ago, the series was added as item Q1000000 to Wikidata, on the heels of other recent entries like the English town Newton-le-Willows (item ID Q750000) and American alpine skier Tim Jitloff (ID Q500000). They’re following in the footsteps of earlier items like Dutch Wikipedia (ID Q10000), which was added just four days after Wikidata was launched on Oct. 30.

“Right now the system is launched (since end of October) and people and bots are filling it,” says Wikidata project director Denny Vrandecic, of the Wikimedia Foundation’s effort to create a free knowledge base about the world that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike.

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WikiSeer Tackles Semantic Summaries

Angela Guess — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 13:00:43 +0000

A new article out of WikiSeer reports that “the Santa Clara based start-up pioneering real-time semantic summarization, today announced that it has successfully tested, training and completed its 1.0 platform update using more than 3.5 million English-based articles available on the Wikipedia.org portal as well as from thousands of additional websites. In real-time WikiSeer captures the essence and core principles from any text document by extracting the five most instructive and informative sentences from a page, link or article. In the course of using Wikipedia there were thousands of articles (topics) whereby the platform would cull through tens of pages and paragraphs to arrive at the five most important sentences (user definable up to 10) with better than 85% accuracy based on user testing and feedback.” continued…

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A Look at How Programming Languages Influence Each Other

Angela Guess — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 14:30:33 +0000

Tony Hirst has written up a demonstration that maps how programming languages influence each other according to Wikipedia. He explains, “By way of demonstrating how the recipe described in Visualising Related Entries in Wikipedia Using Gephi can easily be turned to other things, here’s a map of how different computer programming languages influence each other according to DBpedia/Wikipedia (above).” See the rest of his demonstration here.

In the comments, Hirst notes, “I think one of the major benefits to be had from these sorts of visualisation is in support of a visual analytical conversation between the analyst and the data. continued…

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Finding What’s ‘Important’ on Wikipedia with WikiMaps

Angela Guess — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 12:06:05 +0000

ScienceDaily recently covered an interesting new resource, WikiMaps. According to the article, “An international research team has developed a dynamic tool that allows you to see a map of what is ‘important’ on Wikipedia and the connections between different entries. The tool, which is currently in the ‘alpha’ phase of development, displays classic musicians, bands, people born in the 1980s, and selected celebrities, including Lady Gaga, Barack Obama, and Justin Bieber. A slider control, or play button, lets you move through time to see how a particular topic or group has evolved over the last 3 or 4 years. The desktop version allows you to select any article or topic.” continued…

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Datasift Announces Wikistats

Angela Guess — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 18:00:35 +0000

Datasift recently announced a new feature, Wikistats, and added Wikipedia to the company’s list of data sources. The company reports, “Through Wikistats.co, DataSift provides a real-time insight into the trending articles on Wikipedia in the last 24 hours. Just as we identified the most popular stories on Twitter when we created Tweetmeme, Wikistats is another great showcase of what’s possible with DataSift’s Social-Data platform. By filtering and analyzing the activity stream of new articles and edits on Wikipedia, we’re able to surface an insight into the top articles and content being created. As well as providing a view into all articles on Wikipedia, we use our NLP (Natural Language Processing) service to categorize articles into popular categories including technology, banking, celebrities, politics, sports, and more.” continued…

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Wikidata Closes SemTechBiz SF with a Bang

Angela Guess — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 14:00:33 +0000

Anthony Myers of CMS Wire reports, “Core ideas about a more structured Internet, vis a vis the semantic Web, are quickly approaching mainstream consciousness. When Wikipedia, the sixth most popular Web site in the world, debuts its Wikidata platform later this year, it will be a major step in this direction. ’Wikidata is going to blow everything else out of the water,’ Joe Devon of Startup Devs said during the closing panel of the 2012 Semantic Technology & Business Conference. Devon is also on the advisory board, but Dave McComb, who co-founded the SemTech Conference, also asserted his belief in how huge Wikidata is going to be.” continued…

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Schema.org Now Supports External Lists

Eric Franzon — Mon, 14 May 2012 19:22:12 +0000

The schema.org official blog has announced support for enumerated lists. Adding this support allows developers using schema.org to use selected externally maintained vocabularies in their schema.org markup. According to the W3C-hosted schema.org WebSchemas wiki, “This is in addition to the existing extension mechanisms we support, and the general ability to include whatever markup you like in your pages. The focus here is on external vocabularies which can be thought of as ‘supported’ (or anticipated) in some sense by schema.org.”

In other words, “Schema.org markup uses links into well-known authority lists to clarify which particular instance of a schema.org type (eg. Country) is being mentioned.”

For example, consider a list of countries of the world. A developer could use this URI from Wikipedia to reference the USA or this one from the UN FAO, or this one from GeoNames.

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Wikidata, and a clash of world views

Paul Miller — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Remember the days before Wikipedia had all the answers? We looked things up in libraries, referring to shelf-filling encyclopaedias. We bought CD-ROMs (remember them?) full of facts and pictures and video clips. We asked people. Sometimes, school home work actually required some work more strenuous than a cut and paste. We went about our business without remembering that New Coke briefly entered our lives on this day in 1985.

Wikipedia is far from perfect, and some of the concern around its role in a wider dumbing down of thought and argument may be justified. But, despite that, it’s a remarkable achievement and a wonderful resource. Those who argued that it would never work have clearly been proven wrong. Carefully maintained processes and the core principle of the neutral point of view mostly serve contributors well.

With Wikimedia Deutschland‘s recent announcement of Wikidata, many of the early concerns about Wikipedia itself have resurfaced once again. continued…

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Two Perspectives on Wikidata

Angela Guess — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:24:59 +0000

Mark Graham recently raised some concerns regarding the Wikidata project in The Atlantic. Graham writes, “Wikidata will create a collaborative database that is both machine readable and human editable and which will underpin a lot of knowledge that is presented in all 284 language versions of Wikipedia. In other words, the encyclopaedia plans to become part of the movement from a mostly human-readable Web to a Web in which computers and software can better make sense of information… The reason that Wikidata marks such a significant moment in Wikipedia’s history is the fact that it eliminates some of the scope for culturally contingent representations of places, processes, people, and events. However, even more concerning is that fact that this sort of congealed and structured knowledge is unlikely to reflect the opinions and beliefs of traditionally marginalized groups.”

Graham Continues, “It is important that different communities are able to create and reproduce different truths and worldviews. And while certain truths are universal (Tokyo is described as a capital city in every language version that includes an article about Japan), others are more messy and unclear (e.g. should the population of Israel include occupied and contested territories?).”

Read the full article here.

Denny Vrandečić, project director of Wikidata, posted a thoughtful response to Graham’s article. I have re-posted Vrandečić’s response in its entirety:

Mark,

Thank you for your well-thought criticism. When we were thinking first of adding structured data to Wikipedia, we were indeed thinking of giving every language edition its own data space. This way the Arab and the Hebrew Wikipedia community would not interfere with each other, nor would the Estonian and the Russian communities interfere with each other. continued…

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SWiPE Plans to Make Search a Breeze

Angela Guess — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 18:00:45 +0000

Eileen Brown recently reported that SWiPE hopes to make querying search engines a less frustrating experience. Brown writes, “If you struggle with RDF triples (Resource Description Framework) and SPARQL (Query language and protocol for RDF) do not despair. SWiPE (Searching WIkiPedia by Example) allows semantic and well-structured knowledge bases to be easily queried from within the pages of Wikipedia. If you want to know which cities in Florida, founded in last century have more than 50 thousand people you will be able to enter the query conditions directly into the Infobox of a Wikipedia page. Swipe activates certain fields of Wikipedia that generate equivalent SPARQL queries executed on DBpedia.” continued…

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A Fundamental Linked Data Debate

Richard Wallis — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 11:00:51 +0000

There is a fierce debate going on in the world of the Semantic Web and Linked Data, the question being is it of fundamental importance to realising the benefits of the technology or are they just dancing on the head of a pin. The core debate revolves around something with the stunningly opaque title of the httpRange-14 issue.

The debate has been rumbling on for years but was reignited over the last few days by proposals being submitted to the W3C to clarify and hopefully simplify things. I use the word ignited as that what I was beginning to think my iPhone was about to do – it has been buzzing away like a bumblebee on speed over the last few days announcing the arrival of yet another passionately held opinion from a member of the respected Semantic Web/Linked Data community from Sir Tim Berners-Lee downwards. Fortunately for those of you that do not follow the W3C’s Technical Architecture (TAG) and Linked Open Data (public-lod) mailing lists it may have gone unnoticed.

Let me try to explain, in as simple terms as possible, what the fuss is all about and why it may be important. From my point of view, and there are many surrounding this, the issue is a combination of two problems.

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Paper Review: “Recovering Semantic Tables on the WEB”

Sean Golliher — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 13:55:01 +0000

A paper entitled “Recovering Semantics of Tables on the Web” was presented at the 37^thConference on Very Large Databases in Seattle, WA . The paper’s authors included 6 Google engineers along with professor Petros Venetis of Stanford University and Gengxin Miao of UC Santa Barbara. The paper summarizes an approach for recovering the semantics of tables with additional annotations other than what the author of a table has provided. The paper is of interest to developers working on the semantic web because it gives insight into how programmers can use semantic data (database of triples) and Open Information Extraction (OIE) to enhance unstructured data on the web. In addition they compare how a “maximum-likelihood” model, used to assign class labels to tables, compares to a “database of triples” approach. The authors show that their method for labeling tables is capable of labeling “an order of magnitude more tables on the web than is possible using Wikipedia/YAGO and many more than freebase.”

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The Semantic Web Has Gone Mainstream! Wanna Bet?

Juan Sequeda — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 09:00:18 +0000

In 2005, I started learning about the so-called Semantic Web. It wasn’t till 2008, the same year I started my PhD, that I finally understood what the Semantic Web was really about. At the time, I made a $1000 bet with 3 college buddies that the Semantic Web would be mainstream by the time I finished my PhD. I know I’m going to win! In this post, I will argue why.

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