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<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%">Dear all,</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%">please find below
the first edition of the DBpedia Newsletter, which will be sent to
all subscribers in a three month interval. Of course, we would
welcome any people who are interested to sign up
(<a href="http://eepurl.com/crrrkz"><font color="#1155cc"><u>http://eepurl.com/crrrkz</u></font></a>).
We decided to use the newsletter as the major outlet for updates
on
DBpedia, so no further Newsletter edition will be sent to this
list.
Smaller and concise announcements will be posted on our <a
href="http://blog.dbpedia.org/"><font color="#1155cc"><u>blog</u></font></a>.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%">Also we would
welcome anyone to contribute to the Newsletter with DBpedia (and
Linked Open Data) related announcements by sending an email to
<a href="mailto:dbpedia@infai.org"><font color="#1155cc"><u>dbpedia@infai.org</u></font></a>.
Announcement/News can include links and should be less than 100
words
and are subject to moderation and editorial editing (mostly
shortening).</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%">Newsletter sign up
form:<a href="http://eepurl.com/crrrkz"> </a><a
href="http://eepurl.com/crrrkz"><font color="#1155cc"><u>http://eepurl.com/crrrkz</u></font></a></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%">Thank you very
much,</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%">Sebastian</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%"><br>
</p>
<h2 class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14cm; line-height: 100%;
page-break-inside: auto; page-break-after: auto"><a
name="_vf0avp39nk84"></a>
<font style="font-size: 17pt" size="5"><b>(Belated) Happy New Year
to
all DBpedians!</b></font></h2>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%">We are a proud to
look retrospectively at a successful year 2016 and would like to
welcome 2017 with our new newsletter (~4 times per year), which
will
allow you to stay up to date and provide feedback, e.g. via the
included survey and the planned events in 2017.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%"><b>New members </b>-
We kickstarted the<a
href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/dbpedia-association">
</a><a href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/dbpedia-association"><font
color="#1155cc"><u>DBpedia
Association</u></font></a> with a first wave of new members:
OpenLink
Software, Semantic Web Company, Ontotext, FIZ Karlsruhe, Mannheim
University, Poznań University of Economics and Business, the
Business Information Systems Institute Ltd and the Open Knowledge
Foundation Greece joined the DBpedia Association in 2016. We
created
two web pages that summarize reasons to<a
href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/why-is-dbpedia-so-important">
</a><a href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/why-is-dbpedia-so-important"><font
color="#1155cc"><u>support
DBpedia via donations</u></font></a> and<a
href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/membership">
</a><a href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/membership"><font
color="#1155cc"><u>become
a member</u></font></a>.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%"><b>DBpedia in Dutch</b>
(<a href="http://nl.dbpedia.org/"><font color="#1155cc"><u>http://nl.dbpedia.org</u></font></a>)
is the first chapter which formalized an official DBpedia Chapter
consortium. The cooperation was initiated by Koninklijke
Bibliotheek
(National Library of the Netherlands) and Huygens ING (research
institute of History and Culture). Other partners like imec/Ghent
University, the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision and the
Network Institute (Vrije Universiteit) joined as well. This
cooperation will strengthen the DBpedia Dutch chapter and
community
of contributors as well improve the cooperation with the Dutch
research infrastructure and the Dutch Digital Heritage.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%">We are in intensive
contact with the Japanese, the German and the Italian chapters to
form official chapters and gain institutional support for DBpedia.
You would like to know how to start a DBpedia chapter? Please
check
here:<a href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/about/language-chapters">
</a><a href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/about/language-chapters"><font
color="#1155cc"><u>http://wiki.dbpedia.org/about/language-chapters</u></font></a></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%"><b>DBpedia Releases
</b>- Since 2015 we provide bi-annual DBpedia releases. The latest
one,<a href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/dbpedia-version-2016-04">
</a><a href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/dbpedia-version-2016-04"><font
color="#1155cc"><u>2016-04</u></font></a>,
featured a new Wikipedia references & citation dataset for the
English Wikipedia. In addition, we separated the data which we
received from heuristic-based infobox extractors from the already
mapped and quality-controlled data to remove low quality data and
avoid duplicates & low quality information. We improved on our<a
href="http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/content/wikidata-through-eyes-dbpedia-1">
</a><a
href="http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/content/wikidata-through-eyes-dbpedia-1"><font
color="#1155cc"><u>Wikidata
extraction</u></font></a> and mapped all our data to
Wikidata-based
DBpedia IRIs. Wikidata will become more and more the core of
future
extractions.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%"><b>Consortium
partners for EU and national projects - </b>Since its
conception
DBpedia has never been funded directly, but was supported only by
individual tasks in different projects and by the spirit of
volunteers. With the establishment of the DBpedia Association, we
are
now in a position to receive direct funding and are eligible as a
full consortium partner for EU and International projects.
Furthermore, we are able to mediate trusted partners - who have
worked with us in the past and contributed greatly to DBpedia -
for
national proposals in over 30 countries worldwide (contact via
reply
to this email.)</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%"><b>Events - </b>In
addition to our participation in the 12th edition of the
SEMANTiCS,
in the 19th International Conference on Business Information
Systems
and in the Google Summer of Code project, we arranged three
DBpedia
community meetings, in The Hague, Leipzig and Sunnyvale,
California.
In order to get updates on our events and projects, stay tuned and
check the<a href="http://blog.dbpedia.org/"> </a><a
href="http://blog.dbpedia.org/"><font color="#1155cc"><u>DBpedia
blog</u></font></a>. Please check out the dates to the two
new
DBpedia meetings below.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%"><b>Links - </b>We
have revived the portal, that allows the LOD community to
contribute
their links, so we can include them in DBpedia Releases. If your
database links to DBpedia, you can submit your links here:<a
href="https://github.com/dbpedia/links">
</a><a href="https://github.com/dbpedia/links"><font
color="#1155cc"><u>https://github.com/dbpedia/links</u></font></a>
. We provide additional support for this and also provide a
service,
that - once you have contributed your links - will tell you which
data is linking to your knowledge base via DBpedia<a
href="http://downloads.dbpedia.org/links/backlinks/">
</a><a href="http://downloads.dbpedia.org/links/backlinks/"><font
color="#1155cc"><u>http://downloads.dbpedia.org/links/backlinks/</u></font></a>,
available only for Association members.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%"><i>We would like to
thank again all people who were involved to enable this!</i></p>
<h2 class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0.14cm; line-height: 100%;
page-break-inside: auto; page-break-after: auto"><a
name="_oaumlqthlnso"></a>
<font style="font-size: 17pt" size="5"><b>2017 - New Year - New
Opportunities</b></font></h2>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%">To make 2017 as
great as 2016 we have already reviewed community feedback and
worked
out some plans to bring the DBpedia community closer together
whereas
we attain our goals and follow our visions. Below are the most
important points for 2017.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%"><b>User Survey -
</b>Sören Auer and the DBpedia Board prepared a survey to assess
the
direction of DBpedia and the DBpedia Association. We would like to
know what you think should be our priorities. Please take a minute
and vote here:<a href="https://goo.gl/forms/NQxrMWskcKlZJAU63">
</a><a href="https://goo.gl/forms/NQxrMWskcKlZJAU63"><font
color="#1155cc"><u>https://goo.gl/forms/NQxrMWskcKlZJAU63</u></font></a></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%"><b>User support </b>-
We set up a new portal to streamline support requests for DBpedia.
We
would encourage you to submit all questions to<a
href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/support">
</a><a href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/support"><font
color="#1155cc"><u>http://wiki.dbpedia.org/support</u></font></a>.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%">And … if you are
already an experienced DBpedia user, you can sign up and answer
questions and get kudos. Upon request, we can issue a certificate
for
your CV. During the course of 2017 we will also provide a priority
support channel for members and Chapters.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%"><b>Save the Date</b>
<b>- Galway 21 Jun and Amsterdam 14 Sep</b>. DBpedia will be part
of
the<a href="http://ldk2017.org/"><font color="#1155cc"><u>
Language,
Data and Knowledge (LDK) conference</u></font></a> in
Galway, Ireland
(<b>Submission open until Feb 16th</b>). This new biennial
conference
series aims at bringing together researchers from across
disciplines.
The DBpedia community will have a full day event on 21th of June
2017. Also during the<a href="http://2017.semantics.cc/"> </a><a
href="http://2017.semantics.cc/"><font color="#1155cc"><u>SEMANTiCS
2017 in Amsterdam</u></font></a>, Sep 11-14 (<b>Submission
open until
May 17th or June 23rd</b>), the DBpedia community will get
together
on the 14th of September for a DBpedia community meeting. Updates
will be posted in the respective<a
href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/events">
</a><a href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/events"><font color="#1155cc"><u>events
section</u></font></a> and the<a
href="http://blog.dbpedia.org/">
</a><a href="http://blog.dbpedia.org/"><font color="#1155cc"><u>blog</u></font></a>.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%"><b>TextExt:
DBpedia’s Open Text Extraction Challenge -</b>
(<a href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/textext"><font color="#1155cc"><u>http://wiki.dbpedia.org/textext</u></font></a>)
As DBpedia and Wikidata currently focus primarily on representing
factual knowledge as contained in Wikipedia infoboxes, we created
the
DBpedia Open Text Extraction Challenge. Participants are asked to
submit their engines that extract facts and knowledge from
Wikipedia
article texts to dramatically broaden and deepen the amount of
structured DBpedia/Wikipedia data.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%"><b>Community
coordination</b> - <b>You'd like to get involved in DBpedia? </b>We
set up a new Get Involved section. If you are interested in
details
or would like to get in touch with the DBpedia community, please
read
here:<a href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/get-involved">
</a><a href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/get-involved"><font
color="#1155cc"><u>http://wiki.dbpedia.org/get-involved</u></font></a></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%"><b>Community chairs
</b>- The active community of developers and engineers comes
together
in the DBpedia community committee. We will build up this
committee
with the help of Pablo Mendes and Magnus Knuth who will serve as
provisional chairs. The committee can be joined by recommendation
only based on merit. If you would like to get in contact with the
community committee please check here:<a
href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/about/contact">
</a><a href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/about/contact"><font
color="#1155cc"><u>http://wiki.dbpedia.org/about/contact</u></font></a></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%">Two delegates from
the community committee are elected chairs and will take seats at
the
Board of Trustees. This board is the main decision-making body of
the
DBpedia Association and oversees the association and its work, as
its
ultimate corporate authority. There are four board meetings per
year,
please have a look at the public minutes here:<a
href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/board-minutes">
</a><a href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/board-minutes"><font
color="#1155cc"><u>http://wiki.dbpedia.org/board-minutes</u></font></a></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%"><b>Technical
development I: Wikidata - </b>Many DBpedians are excited about
the
progress<a href="https://www.wikidata.org/"> </a><a
href="https://www.wikidata.org/"><font color="#1155cc"><u>Wikidata</u></font></a>
is making and we are planning to use Wikidata’s data as the new
core for our extraction and fusion. This means that in future
releases we will fuse data from Wikidata with the usual data we
extract from over 100 Wikipedia language editions with additional
data from other high quality LOD sources and do the usual
refinement,
typing and quality-control. We hope that this will provide an
unprecedented knowledge graph with superior coverage, completeness
and correctness.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%"><b>Technical
development II: UnifiedViews - </b>our plan to achieve the
above
mentioned fusion will be realized by an active collaboration with
the<a href="https://www.semantic-web.at/">
</a><a href="https://www.semantic-web.at/"><font color="#1155cc"><u>Semantic
Web Company (SWC)</u></font></a>, where DBpedia developers
work side
by side with the<a href="http://www.poolparty.biz/"> </a><a
href="http://www.poolparty.biz/"><font color="#1155cc"><u>PoolParty
Semantic Suite</u></font></a> technical team to add
scalability,
provenance tracking and linking/fusion capabilities into the Data
Processing Units of the<a
href="https://www.poolparty.biz/unifiedviews/">
</a><a href="https://www.poolparty.biz/unifiedviews/"><font
color="#1155cc"><u>UnifiedViews</u></font></a>
workflows.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%"><b>Technical
development III - </b>For 2017, we hope to establish further
hands-on
collaboration with companies and organisations to push all aspects
of
DBpedia, in particular: search and visualisation, ontology
maintenance, querying and indexing crawling data from web and
social
media. We also work together with our members to prioritize on
integrating data that they think useful.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%"><b>Membership</b> -
If you would like to become a member of the DBpedia Association,
please check all benefits here:<a
href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/membership">
</a><a href="http://wiki.dbpedia.org/membership"><font
color="#1155cc"><u>http://wiki.dbpedia.org/membership</u></font></a>.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%">If you require any
further information, feel free to contact us by replying to this
email. We are already very excited to spend time with you on
further
community meetings and to publish new DBpedia releases.</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%">All the best,</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%">Julia, Dimitris
&
Sebastian</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 115%">DBpedia Association</p>
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