We love the Web. We’ve been using the Internet in various forms since the 90’s. We believe that the increasing amount of information should be structured beforehand by the same individuals that create the content.

With this idea in mind and willing to empower journalists and bloggers we’ve created WordLift: a semantic editor for WordPress.

With the latest release (version 3.4) we are introducing a Dashboard to provide a quick overview of the website’s Knowledge Graph.

What the heck is a Knowledge Graph?

Knowledge Graphs are all around us. Internet giants like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Amazon they are all running their own Knowledge Graphs and willingly or not we are all contributing to them.

Knowledge Graphs are networks of all kind of things which are relevant to a specific knowledge domain or within an organization. They contains abstract concepts and relations as well as instances of all sort of ‘things’ including persons, companies, documents and datasets.

Knowledge Graphs are intelligent data models made of descriptive metadata that can be used to categorise contents.

Why should You bring all your content and data in a Knowledge Graph?

The answer is simple. You want to be relevant for your audience. A Knowledge Graph allows machines (including voice-enabled assistants, smartphone apps and search crawlers) to make complex queries over the entirety of your content. Let’s break this down into benefits:

• Facilitate smarter and more relevant search results and recommendations
• Support intelligent personal assistant like Apple Siri and Google Now understand natural language requests by providing the needed vocabulary to identify content
• Get richer insights on how content is performing and is being received by the audience. Someone calls it Semantic Analytics (more on this topic soon)
• Sell advertising more wisely by providing in-depth context to advertising networks
• Create new services that drive reader engagement
• Share (or sell) metadata to the rest of the World

So what makes WordLift special

WordLift allows anyone to build his/her own Knowledge Graph. The plugin adds a layer of structured metadata to the content you write on WordPress. Every article is classified with named entities and these classifications are used to provide relevant recommendations that boost the articles of your site with widgets like the navigator and the faceted search. There is more.

The deep vocabulary can be used to understand natural language requests like – “Who is the founder of company [X]?”. Let’s dig deeper. Here is an example that uses a generalist question answering tool called Platypus.

Playtypus leverages on the Wikidata Knowledge Graph. Now if I would ask “Who is the founder of Insideout10?” Wikidata, would probably politely answer “I’m sorry but I don’t have this information“.

Now, the interesting part is that, for this specific question, this same blog holds the correct answer.

As named entities are described along with their properties I can consult the metadata about Insideout10and eventually have applications like Platypus run a SPARQL query on my graph.

This query returns two entities:

• http://data.redlink.io/91/be9/entity/andrea_volpini
• http://data.redlink.io/91/be9/entity/david_riccitelli

Who owns the data?

The site owner does. Every website has its own graph published on data.wordlift.it (or any custom domain name you might like) and the creator of the website holds all licensing rights of his/her data. In the next upcoming release a dedicated rights statement will be added to all graphs published with WordLift (here you’ll find the details of this issue).

So how big is this graph?

If we combine all existing beta testers we reach a total of 37.714 triples (this being the unit of measurement of information stored in a Knowledge Graph). Here is a chart representing this data.

While this is a very tiny fraction of the World’s knowledge (Wikidata holds 975.989.631 of triples – here is a simple query to check this information on their systems) it is relevant for the readers’ of this blog and contributes to the veracity of big data (“Is this data accurate?”).

Happy blogging!

The blog post summaries the work done in the context of the EU project FP7-MICO in the area of digital journalism.

This last December we attended in Cairo one of the most exciting events in the Middle East and North Africa region on Entrepreneurship and Hi-Tech startups: RiseUp Summit 2015. We engaged with the overwhelming crowd of startuppers and geeks on our HelixWare booth and in a separated Meetup organised at the Greek Campus.

We had the opportunity, during these two hectic days, to share the research work done in MICO for extending the publishing workflows of independent news organizations with cross-media analysis, natural language processing and linked data querying tools.

… →

When we first started WordLift, we envisioned a simple way for people to structure their content using Semantic Fingerprinting and named entities. Over the last few weeks we’ve seen the Vocabulary as the central place to manage all named entities on a website. Moreover we’ve started to see named entities playing an important role in making the site more visibile to both humans and bots (mainly search engines at this stage).

Here is an overview on the numbers of weekly organic search visits from Google on this blog (while numbers are still small we’ve a 110% growth).

To help editors increase the quality of their entity pages, today, we are launching our new Vocabulary along with version 3.3.

The Vocabulary can be used as a directory for entities. Entities can now be filtered using the “Who“, “Where“, “When” and “What” categories and most importantly entities have a rating and a traffic light to quickly see where to start improving.

Until now it was hard to have a clear overview (thumbnails have been also introduced); it was also hard to see what was missing and..where. The principles for creating successful entity pages can be summarised as follow: 

1. Every entity should be linked to one or more related posts. Every entity has a corresponding web page. This web page acts as a content hub (here is what we have to say about AI on this blog for example) – this means that we shall always have articles linked to our entities. This is not a strict rule though as we might also use the entity pages to build our website (rather than to organise our blog posts).
2. Every entity should have its own description. And this description shall express the editor’s own vision on a given topic. 
3. Every entity should link to other entities. When we chose other entities to enrich the description of an entity we create relationships within our knowledge graph and these relationships are precious and can be used in many different ways (the entity on AI on this blog is connected for instance with the entity John McCarthy who was the first to coin the term in 1955)
4. Entities, just like any post in WordPress, can be kept as draft. Only when we publish them they become available in the analysis and we can use them to classify our contents.
5. Images are worth thousand words as someone used to say. When we add a featured image to an entity we’re also adding the schema-org:image attribute to the entity.
6. Every entity (unless you’re creating something completely new) should be interlinked with the same entity on at least one other dataset. This is called data interlinking and can be done by adding a link to the equivalent entity using the sameAs attribute (here we have for instance the same John McCarthy in the Yago Knowledge Base).
7. Every entity has a type (i.e. Person, Place, Organization, …) and every type has its own set of properties. When we complete all the properties of an entity we increase its visibility.  

Happy blogging!