#DBpedia 3.5 has been released

#Wikipedia aims for its content to be used. Reading it, mashing it, analysing it, republishing it whatever.. DBpedia is an amazing example of what can be done with all the data gathered. To quote from the 3.5 release announcement:

The new DBpedia knowledge base describes more than 3.4 million things, out of which 1.47 million are classified in a consistent ontology, including 312,000 persons, 413,000 places, 94,000 music albums, 49,000 films, 15,000 video games, 140,000 organizations, 146,000 species and 4,600 diseases. The DBpedia data set features labels and abstracts for these 3.2 million things in up to 92 different languages; 1,460,000 links to images and 5,543,000 links to external web pages; 4,887,000 external links into other RDF datasets, 565,000 Wikipedia categories, and 75,000 YAGO categories. The DBpedia knowledge base altogether consists of over 1 billion pieces of information (RDF triples) out of which 257 million were extracted from the English edition of Wikipedia and 766 million were extracted from other language editions.

All this data is there to be used. That is the whole point to DBpedia. It makes all this data available in a format that makes it easy to mash, to analyse, to verify. The key thing is that through DBpedia Wikipedia is linked to many data sources.

• we can project geo data on maps
• we can compare / verify data with other sources
• we can improve the consistency of our data
• we can compare the data between the different language versions
• we can link our illustrations to the GLAM that hold the original
• we can link our sources to public resources where you can read the original text
• we can link our sources to the libraries where you can find a source

DBpedia is a tool that exists today, a tool that wants to be used. It is the kind of tool that helps us out of our isolation and provides us with a niche in the wider data world
Thanks,
      GerardM