Wikipedia as Knowledge Organization System

Digitale Bibliothek Unless noted differently this presentation and all of its parts can be copied and reused under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Jakob Voß Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) Wikipedia as Knowledge Organization System International UDC Seminar 2009 The Hague, 29 October

What do UDC and Wikipedia have in common?

Mundaneum

“ Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge . That's what we're doing.”

Paul Otlet

“ Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.”

Paul Otlet Jimbo Wales Wikimedia Commons

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

The Happy Accident Joseph Reagle: Wikipedia: The Happy Accident. ACM Interactions. Volume 16, Number 3 (2009), pp 42-45. DOI: 10.1145/1516016.1516026 World Wide Web (Infrastructure) Nupedia (Funding) Wiki (Tool) 2001

It’s a wiki!

one database of pages

heavily hyperlinked

everyone can edit

every edit is traced and revertible

It’s the authority!

Most visited websites

Google*

Facebook

Yahoo!

YouTube

Windows Live

Wikipedia

* 95% of Wikipedia articles (en) rank in Google‘s top 10 http://www.alexa.com/topsites

UDC and Wikipedia

Monographic principle one article per topic (and language)

Multilinguality 24 Wikipedias with > 1,000,000 articles 81 Wikipedias with > 1,000 articles

Perpetual modifications Recent changes, page history

How is Knowledge in Wikipedia Organized ?

1. Wikipedia Categories

Download: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/CategoryOverviewIndex.htm

Jakob Voss (2006): Collaborative thesaurus tagging the Wikipedia way. http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0604036

Each article can be sorted into multiple categories

Multihierarchy of categories

It’s a dynamic thesaurus

partly faceted, and precoordinated

UDC 35 Public administration 352(493) Belgian cities 3 Sciences sociales 352 Lowest level of administration (4) Europe (493) Belgium Brusseles

Wikipedia Categories (en) skipped 5 steps skipped 2 steps http://toolserver.org/~dapete/catgraph/ Europe Capitals in Europa Geography Geography of Europe Capitals Brusseles Regions of Belgium Geography by Continent Geography by Place ... by Continent Continents Social Sciences Belgium

Categories and Classifications

2. Wikipedia Article structure

substructure (sections, intro, sentences)

links between articles, to other language editions and to external resources

redirects (synonyms) and disambiguation pages (homonyms)

lists, portals, and navigation boxes

structured infoboxes and geodata

(bibliographic) references

....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels#History

WikiWord Thesaurus

multilingual thesaurus in SKOS, build by mining the Wikipedia link structure

Daniel Kinzler (2008): Automatischer Aufbau eines multilingualen Thesaurus durch Extraktion semantischer und lexikalischer Relationen aus der Wikipedia.

http://brightbyte.de/page/WikiWord

DBpedia

extracts structured information from Wikipedia and converts it to RDF triples

Kobilarov, Bizer, Auer & Lehmann (2009): DBpedia - A Linked Data Hub and Data

Source for Web and Enterprise Applications. http://www2009.eprints.org/228/

http://dbpedia.org/

RDF triples field born in capital of same PND authority file DBpedia (from Wikipedia) other databases Brussels Paul Otlet Belgium Information science Paul Otlet

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Brussels http://sws.geonames.org/2800866/

a hub on the Semantic Web DBPedia the ” Semantic Web ” as of March 2009