Public Library of Science (PLOS) Uses DBpedia in Linked Data Experiment

From the PLOS Tech Blog Post by Rachel Drysdale and Bob Kasenchak.

PLOS publishes articles covering a huge range of disciplines. This was a key factor in PLOS deciding to develop its own thesaurus – currently with 10,767 Subject Area terms for classifying the content.
We wondered whether matching software could establish relationships between PLOS Subject Areas and corresponding terms in external datasets. These relationships could enable links between data resources and expose PLOS content to a wider audience. So we set out to see if we could populate a field for each term in the PLOS thesaurus with a link to an external resource that describes—or, is “the same as”—the concept in the thesaurus. If so, we could:
• Provide links between PLOS Subject Area pages and external resources
• Import definitions to the PLOS thesaurus from matching external resources
For example, adding Linked Data URIs to the Subject Areas would facilitate making the PLOS thesaurus available as part of the Semantic Web of linked vocabularies.
We decided to use DBpedia for this trial for two reasons:
Firstly, as stated by DBpedia “The DBpedia knowledge base is served as Linked Data on the Web. As DBpedia defines Linked Data URIs for millions of concepts, various data providers have started to set RDF links from their data sets to DBpedia, making DBpedia one of the central interlinking-hubs of the emerging Web of Data.
Secondly, DBpedia is constantly (albeit slowly) updated based on frequently-used Wikipedia pages; so has a method to stay current, and a way to add content to DBpedia pages, providing inbound links—so people can link (directly or indirectly) to PLOS Subject Area Landing Pages via DBpedia.

Read the Complete Article, Review Results, View Tables and Graphics.
See Also: Psychology Division of the PLOS thesaurus (.DOC)

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