What is DBpedia?

DBpedia is a community effort to provide a contemporary deductive database derived from Wikipedia content. Project contributions can be partitioned as follows:

  1. Ontology Construction and Maintenance
  2. Dataset Generation via Wikipedia Content Extraction & Transformation
  3. Live Database Maintenance & Administration -- includes actual Linked Data loading and publishing, provision of SPARQL endpoint, and traditional DBA activity
  4. Internationalization.

Why is DBpedia important?

Comprising the nucleus of the Linked Open Data effort, DBpedia also serves as a fulcrum for the burgeoning Web of Linked Data by delivering a dense and highly-interlinked lookup database. In its most basic form, DBpedia is a great source of strong and resolvable identifiers for People, Places, Organizations, Subject Matter, and many other data items of interest. Naturally, it provides a fantastic starting point for comprehending the fundamental concepts underlying TimBL's initial Linked Data meme.

How do I use DBpedia?

Depending on your particular requirements, whether personal or service-specific, DBpedia offers the following:

  • Datasets that can be loaded on your deductive database (also known as triple or quad stores) platform of choice
  • Live browsable HTML+RDFa based entity description pages
  • A wide variety of data formats for importing entity description data into a broad range of existing applications and services
  • A SPARQL endpoint allowing ad-hoc querying over HTTP using the SPARQL query language, and delivering results serialized in a variety of formats
  • A broad variety of tools covering query by example, faceted browsing, full text search, entity name lookups, etc.

What is the DBpedia 3.6 + Virtuoso Cluster Edition Combo?

OpenLink Software has preloaded the DBpedia 3.6 datasets into a preconfigured Virtuoso Cluster Edition database, and made the package available for easy installation.

Why is the DBpedia+Virtuoso package important?

The DBpedia+Virtuoso package provides a cost-effective option for personal or service-specific incarnations of DBpedia.

For instance, you may have a service that isn't best-served by competing with the rest of the world for ad-hoc query time and resources on the live instance, which itself operates under various restrictions which enable this ad-hoc query service to be provided at Web Scale.

Now you can easily commission your own instance and quickly exploit DBpedia and Virtuoso's database feature set to the max, powered by your own hardware and network infrastructure.

How do I use the DBpedia+Virtuoso package?

Pre-requisites are simply:

  1. Functional Virtuoso Cluster Edition installation.
  2. Virtuoso Cluster Edition License.
  3. 90 GB of free disk space -- you ultimately only need 43 gigs, but this our recommended free disk space size pre installation completion.

To install the Virtuoso Cluster Edition simply perform the following steps:

  1. Download Software.
  2. Run installer

  3. Set key environment variables and start the OpenLink License Manager, using command (this may vary depending on your shell):

    . /opt/virtuoso/virtuoso-enterprise.sh
  4. Run the mkcluster.sh script which defaults to a 4 node cluster
  5. Set VIRTUOSO_HOME environment variable -- if you want to start cluster databases distinct from single server databases via distinct root directory for database files (one that isn't adjacent to single-server database directories)
  6. Start Virtuoso Cluster Edition instances using command:
    virtuoso-start.sh
  7. Stop Virtuoso Cluster Edition instances using command:
    virtuoso-stop.sh

To install your personal or service specific edition of DBpedia simply perform the following steps:

  1. Navigate to your installation directory
  2. Download Installer script (dbpedia-install.sh)
  3. Set execution mode on script using command:
    chmod 755 dbpedia-install.sh
  4. Shutdown any Virtuoso instances that may be currently running
  5. Set your VIRTUOSO_HOME environment variable, e.g., to the current directory, via command (this may vary depending on your shell):
    export VIRTUOSO_HOME=`pwd`
  6. Run script using command:
    sh dbpedia-install.sh

Once the installation completes (approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes from start time), perform the following steps:

  1. Verify that the Virtuoso Conductor (HTML based Admin UI) is in place via:
    http://localhost:[port]/conductor
  2. Verify that the Precision Search & Find UI is in place via:
    http://localhost:[port]/fct
  3. Verify that DBpedia's Green Entity Description Pages are in place via:
    http://localhost:[port]/resource/DBpedia

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