Extraction of Historical Events from Wikipedia

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for extracting and providing access to a large dataset of 121,000 historical events from Wikipedia articles spanning 2,500 years, enhancing structured data coverage.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to extract historical events from Wikipedia articles beyond infoboxes and makes this data accessible through multiple interfaces.

Findings

Extracted 121,000 historical events from Wikipedia

Linked events to over 325,000 DBpedia entities

Provided data via Web API, SPARQL, and timeline application

Abstract

The DBpedia project extracts structured information from Wikipedia and makes it available on the web. Information is gathered mainly with the help of infoboxes that contain structured information of the Wikipedia article. A lot of information is only contained in the article body and is not yet included in DBpedia. In this paper we focus on the extraction of historical events from Wikipedia articles that are available for about 2,500 years for different languages. We have extracted about 121,000 events with more than 325,000 links to DBpedia entities and provide access to this data via a Web API, SPARQL endpoint, Linked Data Interface and in a timeline application.