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.

But wait, isn’t Linked Data about… linking data? Unfortunately, while Freebase now does export RDF, its concepts aren’t linked to other datasets in “the cloud“. No problem, we at DBpedia can help out.

So I’m glad to announce that 2.5 Million DBpedia resources are now interlinked with Freebase via owl:sameas links!

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Berlin owl:sameAs http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/guid.9202a8c04000641f80000000000094d6

You can grab a dump here.
So all your concepts which are interlinked with DBpedia can from now on also benefit from the data in Freebase.

And the Semantic Web continues to grow…