DBpedia
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Template:NotAWiki Although not itself a wiki, DBpedia is significant in the wiki world. Founded in 2007 in Germany, DBpedia extracts structured information from Wikipedia via a crowd-sourced community effort, and then makes this information available all on the internet.
Data from DBpedia can be used in many ways, and is ideally suited to mobile applications and mobile devices, such as the modern generation GPS-equipped smartphones. One example is the Android mobile app University Finder – this app extracts data from the Italian Wikipedia, and presents it ordered by user-selectable groups such as 'city' and 'region', and compares a plethora of information on universities in Italy, complete with Google Maps push-pin data.
DBpedia fundamentally works on a 'dataset', and this can probably best be visualised as the structured data found in the many types of 'infoboxes' as found on the many different Wikipedias. DBpedia states that the dataset from the English Wikipedia consists of "3.77 million 'things' with 400 million 'facts'". The data is also available as 'localised' versions in over 110 languages, which together describe 20.8 million things.
Data is publically accessable by all, and can be made available in either CSV or RDF.[1]
- Licensing
Because DBpedia gets its data from from Wikipedia (under its Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License and GNU Free Documentation License), it in turn releases its own content under those same licences. DBpedia does point out the importance of correct attribution when its data is re-used by others. DBpedia also publishes its data in compliance with the Open Definition principles.
- External links