Tag Archives for dbpedia

SEMANTiCS 2014 celebrating its 10th anniversary

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SEMANTiCS conference series will celebrate its 10th anniversary this year in September. SEMANTiCS (formerly known as I-Semantics) has had a long tradition in buidling bridges between practitioners and researchers in the areas of semantic web and linked data technologies. Therefore the SEMANTiCS consortium has developed new strucutures to further elaborate on this special character of this event series:

  • Each conference session will combine talks from industry and research – those two interest groups won’t be seperated from each other anymore
  • DBpedia community will be integrated deeply into SEMANTiCS conference: DBpedia has been the most successful activity in this area so far. A lot of industry-related projects has been built around this dataset. Therefore the 2nd meeting of the DBpedia association will be co-located with SEMANTiCS (taking place on September 3rd, also in Leipzig).
  • Transfer-oriented side events and a centrally located market place will offer great opportunities to discuss about state-of-the-art technologies in the areas of Semantic Web standards based software and products.

I am also happy to announce that PoolParty Semantic Suite is one of the Gold sponsors of this event this year. See you in Leipzig!

Using DBpedia to generate SKOS thesauri

In recent years, we have constantly discussed the application of thesauri and other knowledge models to improve search. Many people understand that thesaurus based search is in many cases better than search algorithms purely based on statistics. Of course the big contra always was, “the costs are too high to establish a good-enough thesaurus or even a high-quality one”.

Imagine you could generate any thesaurus you would like for nearly any knowledge domain you can think of with quite a good quality! Sounds impossible? Reminds you of all the promises made by text mining software which generates “semantic nets” from scratch?

Here at the Semantic Web Company we have been working on SKOSsy for a while. I will explain what this web service can do for you:

SKOSsy generates SKOS based thesauri in German or in English for a domain you are interested in. SKOSsy extracts data from DBpedia, so it can cover anything which is in DBpedia. Thus, SKOSsy works well whenever a first seed thesaurus should be generated for a certain organisation or project. If you load the automatically generated thesaurus into an editor like PoolParty Thesaurus Manager (PPT) you can start to enrich the knowledge model by additional concepts, relations and links to other LOD sources. But you don´t have to start in the open countryside with your thesaurus project.

With SKOSsy in place custom-tailored text extractors can be produced with low effort. To sum up,

  • SKOSsy makes heavy use of Linked Data sources, especially DBpedia
  • SKOSsy can generate SKOS thesauri for virtually any domain within a few minutes
  • Such thesauri can be improved, curated and extended to one´s individual needs but they serve usually as “good-enough” knowledge models for any semantic search application you like
  • SKOSsy based semantic search usually outperform search algorithms based on statistics since they contain high-quality information about relations, labels and disambiguation
  • SKOSsy works perfectly together with PoolParty product family

Which domains are you interested in? Give it a try!