Towards an automatic creation of localized versions of DBpedia

Abstract

DBpedia is a large-scale knowledge base that exploits Wikipedia as primary data source. The extraction procedure requires to manually map Wikipedia infoboxes into the DBpedia ontology. Thanks to crowdsourcing, a large number of infoboxes has been mapped in the English DBpedia. Consequently, the same procedure has been applied to other languages to create the localized versions of DBpedia. However, the number of accomplished mappings is still small and limited to most frequent infoboxes. Furthermore, mappings need maintenance due to the constant and quick changes of Wikipedia articles. In this paper, we focus on the problem of automatically mapping infobox attributes to properties into the DBpedia ontology for extending the coverage of the existing localized versions or building from scratch versions for languages not covered in the current version. The evaluation has been performed on the Italian mappings. We compared our results with the current mappings on a random sample re-annotated by the authors. We report results comparable to the ones obtained by a human annotator in term of precision, but our approach leads to a significant improvement in recall and speed. Specifically, we mapped 45,978 Wikipedia infobox attributes to DBpedia properties in 14 different languages for which mappings were not yet available. The resource is made available in an open format. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.