A new global database Wikidata

Fund Wikimedia Foundation, behind the creation of the famous online encyclopedia, has announced the launch of its first major project in 2006 under the name Wikidata.

The new project involves creating a database for the use of hybrid cars and people, and make the knowledge it will, and users, as is the case with Wikipedia, and machinery. Support for the project has already claimed a number of large companies and private investors.

Strictly speaking, trying to turn a huge library of knowledge Wikipedia into a structured data source has already been made. For example, the project DBpedia tried to create such a system, but it was one-sided - client machines could not make it to my edits. The new project Wikidata, in turn, not only makes the data available for humans and machines - it allows you to make changes on the face and the living and the inanimate computer systems.

The project aims to develop Wikidata semantic database, available for reading machines should help not only over the Internet as a whole, but also the Wikipedia. Structure plan for all language versions of Wikipedia containing knowledge of the same concepts. To date, the maximum coverage of the information available in English, German, French and Dutch, but other languages, including Russian, are far behind.

Structuring data Wikidata will automatically respond to requests such as "ten largest cities in the world, where the mayor is a woman." At the moment, the answers to such questions can be found in the so-called Wikipedia Schedules, which are prepared by hand. The project will help to shape Wikidata ikhi automatically.

Starting work on creating a database Wikidata is the German branch of the Wikimedia Deutschland. In the future we plan to transfer authority for management and maintenance of the international headquarters of the Wikimedia. Fully international phase of the project should start in March 2013. The entire project is divided into three phases, the first of which includes the creation of pages for each record Wikidata Wikipedia on all 280-plus languages. All figures are, therefore, will be stored in a single source - the database Wikidata. Also in the first phase is planned to centralize the links between different language versions of Wikipedia - this phase should be completed by August 2012.

In the second phase, the editors will be able to add and use the data Wikidata (completion date - December 2012). Finally, the third phase will provide the automatic creation of lists and graphs based on data Wikidata, so that the Wikipedia article will be filled, including the results of processing database Wikidata.

Already, the development of the project Wikidata receives strong support - funding of $ 1.3 million half provides the Institute of Artificial Intelligence Allen, who was created by Paul Allen (Paul Allen), co-founder of Microsoft, in 2010 Another quarter of the initial funding provided Gordon Foundation and Betty Moore (Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation) and a quarter - by Google. Incidentally, it is the latter, apparently, plans to leverage the results of the project Wikidata in its search technology, because, in fact, a problem - a lot of disparate structured data and unstructured to give answers to queries using semantic special algorithms.