Gerhard Weikum

Max-Planck-Institute for Informatics (MPI)

For a Few Triples More

The Web of Linked Data contains about 25 billion RDF triples and almost half a billion links across data sources; it is becoming a great asset for semantic applications. Linked Data comprises large general-purpose knowledge bases like DBpedia, Yago, and Freebase, as well as many reference collections in a wide variety of areas, spanning sciences, culture, entertainment, and more. Notwithstanding the great potential of Linked Data, this talk argues that there are significant limitations that need to be overcome for further progress. These limitations regard data scope and, especially, data quality. The talk discuss these issues and approaches to extending and enriching Linked Data, in order to improve its scope, quality, interpretability, cross-linking, and usefulness.

Gerhard Weikum is a Research Director at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics (MPII) in Saarbruecken, Germany, where he is leading the department on databases and information systems. He is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science of Saarland University  in Saarbruecken, Germany, and he is a principal investigator of the Cluster of Excellence on Multimodal Computing and Interaction. Earlier he held positions at Saarland University in Saarbruecken, Germany, at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, at MCC in Austin, Texas, and he was a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. He received his diploma and doctoral degrees from the University of Darmstadt, Germany.