UPDATE: DBpedia Search is currently offline. An updated version will be available soon at http://search.dbpedia.org.
Building the Semantic Web is about integrating data, that is already out there.
A large body of information and knowledge is often already available in structured form, yet not accessible as such on the Web. Wikipedia is one of the most prominent examples.
Integrating open data provides real value. It saves the time and effort to re-enter data that is already out there and it leaves the data and editing where it belongs: at its origin.
The DBpedia.org community project approaches that problem by extracting structured information from Wikipedia and making it available on the Web using Semantic Web technologies.
Being part of Linking Open Data project, DBpedia can and already does function as a link hub between different datasets.
Within the Semantic Web Community, DBpedia is already perceived as a useful source of data with powerful query possibilities (see Michael K. Bergmann’s excellent article about DBpedia).
However, DBpedia lacks a simple way to explore that data, to make it usable and useful to everyone, not only to developers. My primary object was to solve this problem when I started the development of a new Linked Data browser in early April. Thereby bringing together the structured data approach with the usability paradigm of the current Web 2.0 movement.
Furthermore, since Semantic Web has received heightened attention from the internet community and specialized media, start-ups and entrepreneurs have entered the scene, but they tend to work behind closed doors, to hide their ideas behind closed beta sign-in-screens and call that “stealth mode”.
Hence, to contrast that, here is the public, sign-in-free prototype release:
Search DBpedia.org
“Search DBpedia.org” is a web application that combines the strengths of structured and linked open data with a new data browsing experience. It features full text search capability, offers faceted browsing (not yet, but that’s to come), uses entity relations, shows result classifications, and allows to explore the DBpedia dataset and its linked data. It uses open Semantic Web standards like RDF, SPARQL and FRESNEL.
To give a short example: Search for “Scorsese” to find the director “Martin Scorsese” as well as films that are related to him. The result item “The Departed” shows that it is a film directed by Martin Scorsese. One could now select from a tag cloud showing all types of results weighted by their estimated relevance to narrow the set of results. So if one is looking for films related to Scorsese, simply select “film” from the tag cloud. One could also use “Martin” as a search term to find the director Scorsese or the film “The Departed”. Try that in Wikipedia’s search…
Another example: Looking for “Tim Bearners-Lee”, one get a details view of his data and also of data about his publications that comes from the linked dataset of DBLP.
Being a first prototype, there are some open issues, performance limitations and certainly many bugs. But talking about technology is so much better when having something real to talk about. Small but real things can start something big.
Like Mike Linksvayer said after the original release of DBpedia back in January:
The Semantic Web is so here, now. Doubters repent!
[...] Once people get hooked on access to a semantic encyclopedia they will want similar access to the entire web!
This article is intended to be the first of a series of articles describing the new user experience provided by “Search DBpedia.org.”
Some words about my background: I’m a research assistant at the Free University of Berlin, working together with Chris Bizer and Richard Cyganiak. I’m a founding member of the DBpedia.org project and the development leader in the areas of data integration and visualization.
