Guest Speaker Markus Krötzsch

On Tuesday, June 23th 2015, Prof. Dr. Markus Krötzsch (Technische Universität Dresden) will give a guest lecture at 14:00 in S02|02 A102.

Title: Wikidata: A Free Collaborative Knowledge Base

Abstract:

Wikidata, the free knowledge base of Wikipedia, is one of the largest collections of human-authored structured information that are freely available on the Web. It is curated by a unique community of tens of thousands of editors who contribute in up to 400 different languages. Data is stored in a language-independent way, so that most users can access information in their native language. To support plurality, Wikidata uses a rich content model that gives up on the idea that the world can be described as a set of “true” facts. Instead, statements in Wikidata provide additional context information, such as temporal validity and provenance (in particular, most statements in Wikidata already provide one or more references).

One could easily image this to lead to a rather chaotic pile of disjointed facts that are hard to use or even navigate. However, large parts of the data are interlinked with international authority files, catalogues, databases, and, of course, Wikipedia. Moreover, the community strives to reach “global” agreement on how to organise knowledge: over 1,000 properties and tens of thousands of classes are currently used as an ontology of the system, and many aspects of this knowledge model are discussed extensively in the community. Together, this leads to a multilingual knowledge base of increasing quality that has many practical uses.

This talk gives an overview of the project, explains design choices, and discusses emerging developments and opportunities related to Wikidata.

Bio:

Markus Krötzsch is an Emmy Noether Research Group Leader at the Computer Science Faculty of TU Dresden. Before that, he got his PhD at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in 2010, and worked at the University of Oxford until 2013. His research has contributed to the fields of lightweight and rule-based ontology languages, query answering, and data management and integration. Notable projects of his include Wikipedia's knowledge base Wikidata, the content management system Semantic MediaWiki, and the ontology reasoner ELK.