We are happy to announce a first release of DBpedia Spotlight – Shedding Light on the Web of Documents.

The amount of data in the Linked Open Data cloud is steadily increasing. Interlinking text documents with this data enables the Web of Data to be used as background knowledge within document-oriented applications such as search and faceted browsing.

DBpedia Spotlight is a tool for annotating mentions of DBpedia resources in text, providing a solution for linking unstructured information sources to the Linked Open Data cloud through DBpedia. The DBpedia Spotlight Architecture is composed by the following modules:

Web application, a demonstration client (HTML/Javascript UI) that allows users to enter/paste text into a Web browser and visualize the resulting annotated text.

Web Service, a RESTful Web API that exposes the functionality of annotating and/or disambiguating entities in text. The service returns XML, JSON or RDF.

Annotation Java / Scala API, exposing the underlying logic that performs the annotation/disambiguation.

Indexing Java / Scala API, executing the data processing necessary to enable the annotation/disambiguation algorithms used.

More information about DBpedia Spotlight can be found at:

http://spotlight.dbpedia.org

DBpedia Spotlight is provided under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0. Part of the code uses LingPipe under the Royalty Free License.

The source code can be downloaded from:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dbp-spotlight

The development of DBpedia Spotlight was supported by:

Neofonie GmbH, a Berlin-based company offering leading technologies in the area of Web search, social media and mobile applications ( http://www.neofonie.de/ ).

The European Commission through the project LOD2 – Creating Knowledge out of Linked Data ( http://lod2.eu/ ).

Lots of thanks to:

Andreas Schultz for his help with the SPARQL endpoint.

Paul Kreis for his help with evaluations.

Robert Isele and Anja Jentzsch for their help in early stages with the DBpedia extraction framework.

Cheers,