Category Archives: Tools & Software

Andreas Blumauer

Automatic text analytics using DBpedia and PoolParty – A Live Demo

by , Category: Linked Data & Open Data, Semantic Web Applications, Text Mining, Tools & Software

Let me show you which steps have to be taken to generate a high-quality text mining application, ready to be used to annotate and to categorize any kind of text or documents covering nearly any domain. With our approach of thesaurus based text mining your documents can also be linked to the world of linked (open) data; enrich your documents with data from the LOD cloud!

Step 1. Generate a thesaurus by using a linked data source like DBpedia

As recently reported SWC has developed a tool called SKOSsy which can be used to extract seed thesauri from DBpedia. In our example I will generate a knowledge model describing the domain of “digital photography“. This step took around 15 minutes.

Step 2. Load the thesaurus into PoolParty and improve it to your needs

After the seed thesaurus has been loaded into PoolParty Thesaurus Manager you have many possibilities to enhance the knowledge model further: Add more categories, synonyms, relations etc. In this example I use the seed-thesaurus without any further improvements. This step took approximately 2 minutes.

Step 3. Generate an automatic text extractor on top of your thesaurus

This step took a couple of seconds and ended up in having generated a fast and reliable text mining application on top of PoolParty Extractor, ready to be used to enrich your documents with data from the LOD cloud.

You can try it out here: PPX Live-Demo

To try the extractor on your own, please take a look at the image above which shows a proper configuration, you have to insert the following UUID in the form: d35d4ddb-adc3-4ea5-b027-deacac03e391

Since our example is all about ‘digital photography’, we recommend to use text samples (or some fragments) like these ones to test the quality of PPX based text analytics:

Let us know what you think about this straight-forward approach and your opinion about the quality of the results. We believe that thesaurus based text mining is in many cases an alternative to some other approaches, especially if you want to to enrich your content with information from the upcoming web of data.

Of course we would be happy to generate other demos in the areas of your interest! Just get in contact with us by using our contact form.

Thomas Thurner

SKOSsy-Lottery: Free Pass to Semantic Tech & Business Conference, Berlin

by , Category: Tools & Software, Vocabularies & Languages

As PoolParty Team is present at SemTechBiz Berlin 2012 (February 6-7), we want you to join us.  This is why we have issued a little lottery to give away a full conference pass (€795) plus our unique PoolParty Cocktail Shaker in a set

How to enter the SKOSsy-lottery:

  • Enter a comment in this post. One comment per person. Describing which type of thesaurus you are interested in.
  • All comments must be submitted before Jan 25, 2012.
  • The winners will be selected at random.

Together with our PoolParty Suite, we are ready to present SKOSsy on our booth at SemTechBiz Berlin 2012 Exhibition area.  SKOSsy is a handsome tool, which generates SKOS based seed-thesauri in German or in English by extracting data from DBpedia. See our finger exercise on a thesaurus describing the world of Alan Turing – done with SKOSsy.

Let us know, which knowledge realm you are interested in and join the lottery now. Good luck, and see you in Berlin.

 

Andreas Blumauer

WordPress plugin to make use of linked data

by , Category: Tools & Software

PoolParty Team has recently published an improved version of their WordPress plugin which enables linked data enrichments of blogs. Therefore a SKOS based vocabulary has to be uploaded or retrieved from a SPARQL-endpoint. Users and developers benefit from

  • automatic annotation of all blog entries displayed as tooltips
  • a comfortable search facility with auto-complete over all concepts from the linked thesaurus including semantic search over the whole blog
  • an integrated thesaurus browser, plus
  • a corresponding linked data frontend including RDF/XML serialization of the underlying thesaurus + SPARQL endpoint

All details about the new version 2.2.3 can be read here.

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Andreas Blumauer

Introducing SKOSsy – generate thesauri on the fly!

by , Category: Linked Data & Open Data, Ontology Engineering, Search Engines, Text Mining, Tools & Software

Imagine you could generate any thesaurus you would like for nearly any knowledge domain you can think of with quite a good quality! Sounds impossible? Reminds you of all the promises made by text mining software which generates “semantic nets” from scratch?

Let me introduce you to SKOSsy. I will explain what this web service can do for you:

SKOSsy generates SKOS based thesauri in German or in English for a domain you are interested in. Not any domain but nearly any: SKOSsy extracts data from DBpedia, so it can cover anything which is in DBpedia. Thus, SKOSsy works well whenever a first seed thesaurus should be generated for a certain organisation or project. If you load the automatically generated thesaurus into an editor like PoolParty Thesaurus Manager (PPT) you can start to enrich the knowledge model by additional concepts, relations and links to other LOD sources. But you don´t have to start in the open countryside with your thesaurus project.

Let me give you an example: Imagine you are working for a company which is an international plant builder and you would like to index several thousands of documents the “semantic way”. You have to walk through the following steps:

  1. Identify proper categories in Wikipedia/DBpedia which describe best what your business or your domain is all about. Those categories should contain pages / resources which are related to the documents you would like to index. For example: http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Metalworking or http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Industrial_automation
  2. After you have selected proper categories SKOSsy will traverse DBpedia for you and collect all resources, their hierarchical and non-hierarchical relations, alternative labels, definitions and other properties and put them together as a valid SKOS thesaurus; this step will last a couple of minutes. (Find the resulting vocabulary here)
  3. Load the resulting thesaurus into PPT, explore it, improve it and enrich it with additional facts.
  4. After you´re done you can generate a tailor-made text extractor by using PoolParty Extractor (PPX) which is the second component of PoolParty product family
  5. With PPX and its extraction model especially curated for your special use case you can extract named entities from your documents automatically and index your documents in a meaningful way.
  6. After a few seconds your semantic search engine is ready to be used. PoolParty Semantic Search (PPS) which is the third PoolParty component will offer some nice facilities like categorized auto-complete, faceted search, content recommendation (similarity search) and smart search suggestions to ease your life as a knowledge worker.

We have constantly discussed the application of thesauri and other knowledge models to improve search over the last years. Many people understood straight away why thesaurus based search is most often much better than search algorithms purely based on statistics. Of course the big contra always was, “the costs are too high to establish a “good-enough” thesaurus or even a “high-quality” one”.

With SKOSsy in place those kinds of arguments become weaker and weaker. To sum up,

  • SKOSsy makes heavy use of Linked Data sources, especially DBpedia
  • SKOSsy can generate SKOS thesauri for virtually any domain within a few minutes
  • Such thesauri can be improved, curated and extended to one´s individual needs but they serve usually as “good-enough” knowledge models for any semantic search application you like
  • SKOSsy based semantic search usually outperform search algorithms based on statistics since they contain high-quality information about relations, labels and disambiguation
  • SKOSsy works perfectly together with PoolParty product family

If you are interested in the results produced by SKOSsy, just send us a short note about your domain or your project and we will send you an invitation as beta-tester or prepare a demo for you.

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