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KBpedia Continues Quality Improvements

CORALVILLE, IA (12/04/2019) -- Michael Bergman and Fred Giasson, the co-editors of the open-source KBpedia, today announced the release of version 2.20 of the system. KBpedia is a knowledge graph that provides an overlay for interoperating and conducting machine learning across its constituent public knowledge bases of Wikipedia, Wikidata, GeoNames, DBpedia, schema.org, and Cyc. KBpedia contains more than 53,000 reference concepts and their mappings to these knowledge bases, structured into a logically consistent knowledge graph that may be reasoned over and manipulated. KBpedia acts as a computable scaffolding over these broad knowledge bases.

"We're preparing to register KBpedia on many public repository sites, and we wanted to make sure quality was a high as possible as we begin this process," Bergman said. "As a system built from many constituent knowledge bases, duplicates and inconsistencies can arise when combining them," said Bergman. "We conducted a comprehensive manual review to identify and remove many of these issues."

According to the editors about 10,000 changes were made to this newest release. The editors noted the major changes to KBpedia that resulted from this inspection included:

• Removal of about 2,000 reference concepts (RCs) and their mappings and definitions pertaining to individual species, which was an imbalance in relation to the other generic RCs in the system;
• Manual inspection and fixes to the 70 or so typologies (for instance, Animals or Facilities) that are used to cluster the RCs into logical groupings;
• Removal of references to UMBEL, one of KBpedia's earlier constituent knowledge bases, due to retirement of the UMBEL system;
• Fixes due to user comments and suggestions since the prior release of version 2.10 in April 2019; and
• Adding some select new RCs in order to improve the connectivity and fill gaps with the earlier version.

Bergman noted this release is the cleanest and highest quality yet for the knowledge graph. "We are now in position to extend the system to new mappings and broader use by the public," he added.

The number and structure of KBpedia's typologies remain unchanged from prior versions. The number of RCs now stands at 53,465, smaller than the 55,301 reference concepts in the prior version.

The KBpedia Web site provides a working KBpedia explorer and demo of how the system may be applied to local content for tagging or analysis. KBpedia splits between entities and concepts, on the one hand, and splits in predicates based on attributes, external relations, and pointers or indexes, all informed by Charles Peirce's prescient theories of knowledge representation. Mappings to all external sources are provided in the linkages to the external resources file in the KBpedia downloads. (A larger inferred version is also available.) The external sources keep their own record files. KBpedia distributions provide the links. However, you can access these entities through the KBpedia explorer on the project's Web site (see these entity examples for cameras, cakes, and canyons; clicking on any of the individual entity links will bring up the full instance record. Such reachthroughs are straightforward to construct.) See further the Github site for further downloads. All resources are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.

About KBpedia

The KBpedia knowledge structure combines six (6) public knowledge bases - Wikipedia, Wikidata, schema.org, DBpedia, GeoNames, and OpenCyc - into an integrated whole. These core KBs are supplemented with mappings to more than a score of additional leading vocabularies. The entire KBpedia structure is computable, meaning it can be reasoned over and logically sliced-and-diced to produce training sets and reference standards for machine learning and data interoperability. KBpedia provides a coherent overlay for retrieving and organizing Wikipedia or Wikidata content. KBpedia greatly reduces the time and effort traditionally required for knowledge-based artificial intelligence (KBAI) tasks. KBpedia was first released in October 2016 with some open source aspects, and was made fully open in 2018. KBpedia is sponsored by Cognonto Corporation.

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