The Linked Data Web is about reusing and linking URIs. With DBpedia, we provide URIs for a broad range of topics: People, organizations, countries, cities, rivers, mountains, music albums, films, books, buildings, etc. 2.6 million URIs overall.

But it didn’t used to be easy enough to find a DBpedia URI for a given keyword. DBpedia Lookup aims to fill that gap. It provides a service to find the most-likely DBpedia URIs for a given keyword. The algorithm ranks DBpedia resources based on their relevance in Wikipedia and includes synonyms into the underlying Lucene index.

Try the terms “Shakespeare“, “EU“, “Eiffel“, or “Cambridge” and see for yourself if the results you’d expect show up at the top. The result ranking is different – and supposed to be more useful – than a simple full-text search or SPARQL-Query with embedded regular expression for matching labels.

There is a web-service available as well. You can use the KeywordSearch method for searching full terms, and the PrefixSearch method for an autocompletion-style interface such as the one you see here. The webservice returns a list of resource URIs with English abstracts, dbpedia classes and categories.

Feel free to use the service as you like. If you plan to use it in a production system or to run a high-load batch process, please drop me a message to let me know.

I hope that DBpedia Lookup is useful, and I’d appreciate any feedback.

Many thanks to the semantic web folks at the BBC for their support and feedback on the development of DBpedia Lookup.

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