Community-Driven Engineering of the DBpedia Infobox Ontology and DBpedia Live Extraction

The DBpedia project aims at extracting information based on semi-structured data present in Wikipedia articles, interlinking it with other knowledge bases, and publishing this information as RDF freely on the Web. So far, the DBpedia project has succeeded in creating one of the largest knowledge bases on the Data Web, which is used in many applications and research prototypes. However, the manual effort required to produce and publish a new version of the dataset – which was already partially outdated the moment it was released – has been a drawback. Additionally, the maintenance of the DBpedia Ontology, an ontology serving as a structural backbone for the extracted data, made the release cycles even more heavyweight. In the course of this thesis, we make two contributions: Firstly, we develop a wiki-based solution for maintaining the DBpedia Ontology. By allowing anyone to edit, we aim to distribute the maintenance work among the DBpedia community. Secondly, we extend DBpedia with a Live Extraction Framework, which is capable of extracting RDF data from articles that have recently been edited on the English Wikipedia. By making this RDF data automatically public in near realtime, namely via SPARQL and Linked Data, we overcome many of the drawbacks of the former release cycles