20140116 BG DBpedia and Wikipedia-GLAM

For a year now, an idea has been bandied around to focus BG cultural heritage documentation efforts around Wikipedia/DBpedia/Wikidata.
These free information resources, the center of the Linked Open Data cloud, can enable cultural heritage workers to collaborate on describing the common elements of our Cultural Heritage. It's not right that foreign Wikipedias have more information about our kings, artists, politicians and events; and the data extracted in BG DBpedia is half missing and half wrong.

Ontotext is starting to do something about it:
- Started improving BG DBpedia mappings, reporting problems in the extraction & ontology, etc
- We're trying to initiate a corresponding project in BG Wikipedia. See [https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Уикипедия:BG_DBpedia] for some background and practical examples.
- Ontotext has offered to host [http://bg.dbpedia.org], which should be ready for review end of January 2015.
- Ontotext will attend the next international DBpedia meeting (9 Feb 2015, Dublin): http://wiki.dbpedia.org/meetings/Dublin2015. We'll talk/discuss on 2 topics:
-- Improving the DBpedia ontology and mappings
-- Starting a BG DBpedia chapter

There is an active BG Wikipedia community:
- Established December 2003 (on 15 Jan, the official 10-year anniversary of BG Wikipedia was celebrated in the press)
- As of Dec 2014, there are 185K articles on BG Wikipedia
- The Wikimedians of Bulgaria User Group was approved in late 2014
- The registration of a Wikimedia NGO is pending
- The BG Wikipedia community presented at the Wikimedia CEE conference 2014 (Kiev)

Ontotext will attend the next BG Wikipedia meeting (between Feb 2 and 6) to discuss DBpedia and the value of data: [https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Уикипедия:Уикисреща/Семинари/2015-02/дата].
(i) GLAM and other Cultural Heritage workers, please register there and attend if you are interested!