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WikiOnt: An Ontology For Describing and Exchanging Wikipedia Articles

An ontology for making Wikipedia machine-readable, presented at Wikimania 2005 with co-authors from DERI, NUI Galway.

Semantic Web
Ontologies
Wikipedia

Citations

Venue

Wikimania 2005

Location

Frankfurt, Germany

Published

5 August 2005

Type

Conference Paper

The Paper

Abstract

Ontologies are formal specifications of how to represent the entities in a specific area and the interrelations among them. In the Semantic Web, ontologies can be used to share and reuse knowledge via the Web and they can be seen as a means for knowledge management on a global scale.

A specific wiki ontology can be built to integrate Wikipedia (and by extension other MediaWiki-based sites) into the Semantic Web framework and to make Wikipedia machine processable and understandable. Through the use of RDF (Resource Description Framework, a W3C recommendation) and URIs, Wikipedia content could be identified, described, linked and combined with other Semantic Web data sources.

Authors & Affiliation

Collaboration

Andreas Harth, DERI, NUI Galway
Hannes Gassert, University of Fribourg, Switzerland (visiting scholar at DERI, 2005)
Ina O’Murchu, DERI, NUI Galway
John G. Breslin, DERI, NUI Galway
Stefan Decker, DERI, NUI Galway

In Brief

What This Paper Explores

WikiOnt proposes an OWL ontology describing Wikipedia’s structure, articles, categories, stubs, and images, so that Wikipedia content can be linked and combined with other Semantic Web data using RDF. The authors built a working PHP converter to transform Wikipedia’s database dumps into this RDF format, and discussed how the resulting dataset could connect to other structured sources like WordNet and the CIA World Factbook. The worked example running through the paper is the Wikipedia article on Galway, a nice, quietly appropriate detail given the paper was co-authored at DERI, in Galway.

Cite This

Citation

Harth, A., Gassert, H., O'Murchu, I., Breslin, J. G., & Decker, S. (2005). WikiOnt: An Ontology for Describing and Exchanging Wikipedia Articles. Presented at Wikimania 2005, Frankfurt, Germany. Supported by Science Foundation Ireland under the DERI Lion project (SFI/02/CE1/I131)