With Community Bonding going on in its full swing, let me tell you something about the organization I’m contributing to, i.e. DBpedia. Since they already have a fantastic summary about the organisation on their page, I’m going to summarize (more like quote) the summary they have already provided. (Yes, I’m very lazy :P)

DBpedia is a crowd-sourced community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia, and to link the different data sets on the Web to Wikipedia data.

Knowledge bases are playing an increasingly important role in enhancing the intelligence of Web and enterprise search and in supporting information integration. Today, most knowledge bases cover only specific domains, are created by relatively small groups of knowledge engineers, and are very cost intensive to keep up-to-date as domains change. At the same time, Wikipedia has grown into one of the central knowledge sources of mankind, maintained by thousands of contributors. The DBpedia project leverages this gigantic source of knowledge by extracting structured information from Wikipedia and by making this information accessible on the Web under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and the GNU Free Documentation License.

The DBpedia knowledge base has several advantages over existing knowledge bases: it covers many domains; it represents real community agreement; it automatically evolves as Wikipedia changes, and it is truly multilingual. The DBpedia knowledge base allows you to ask quite surprising queries against Wikipedia, for instance “Give me all cities in New Jersey with more than 10,000 inhabitants” or “Give me all Italian musicians from the 18th century”. Altogether, the use cases of the DBpedia knowledge base are widespread and range from enterprise knowledge management, over Web search to revolutionizing Wikipedia search.

So, to summarize the summary of the summary,

What is DBpedia?

• DBpedia is an open, free and comprehensive knowledge base constantly improved and extended by a large global community
• DBpedia can be used to directly answer fact questions about a wide range of topics
• Users exploit DBpedia as background knowledge for document ranking, natural language understanding, as well as data integration methods
• Data grows with Wikipedia and Wikidata
• The extractors are updated frequently to build our 8.8 billion fact, large-scale-cross-domain knowledge graph
• DBpedia has thousands of users, for example:
  • large companies such as Wolters Kluwer
  • libraries
  • researchers
  • web developers

Why is DBpedia important?

DBpedia provides a complementary service to Wikipedia by exposing knowledge (from 130 Wikimedia projects, in particular the English Wikipedia, Commons, Wikidata and over 100 Wikipedia language editions) in a quality-controlled form compatible with tools covering ad-hoc structured data querying, business intelligence & analytics, entity extraction, natural language processing, reasoning & inference, machine learning services, and artificial intelligence in general. Data is published strictly in line with “Linked Data” principles using open standards (e.g., URIs, HTTP, HTML, RDF, and SPARQL) and open data licensing.

You can visit the official DBpedia website for more information about the DBpedia Organisation, community, projects and more!