Two weeks ago (but still worthwhile mentioning) Holger Knublauch from Topquadrant made a little video for his blog, highlighting how DBpedia can be used to link different domain models with each other, a feature that’s now incorporated in TopBraid Composer 2.5.3. He explains DBpedia as
an RDF repository based on Wikipedia. DBpedia provides machine-readable RDF data for each of the pages in Wikipedia. Each Wikipedia page is represented by a corresponding RDF resource, and these resources are associated with RDF property values to provide descriptions, images, cross-references and tons of useful background knowledge. For example, the DBpedia pages for cities (e.g., Canberra) contain geographical information, the number of inhabitants, population density, links to famous inhabitants and average temperatures, all in machine-processable form. While these property values may not be totally stable and reliable, they are at least a good start.
However, the main benefit of DBpedia is that it provides relatively stable URIs for all relevant real-world concepts. This makes it a natural place to connect specific domain models with each other. If I publish my RDF files with links to DBpedia and you do the same, then we can automatically find cross-references and might more easily find mappings between our domain models. All I need to do is to add links such as { my:Canberra owl:sameAs dbpedia:Canberra }.
Here’s the link to the blogpost, and here the direct link to the video (*.wmv, 10,8 MB)
