[1][2] DBpedia allows users to semantically query relationships and properties of Wikipedia resources, including links to other related datasets.

[3] The project was heralded as "one of the more famous pieces" of the decentralized Linked Data effort by Tim Berners-Lee, one of the Internet's pioneers.

[further explanation needed] One of the challenges in extracting information from Wikipedia is that the same concepts can be expressed using different parameters in infobox and other templates, such as |birthplace= and |placeofbirth=.

Due to the large diversity of infoboxes and properties in use on Wikipedia, the process of developing and improving these mappings has been opened to public contributions.

Specifically, running a local mirror of Wikipedia and retrieving rendered abstracts from it made extracted texts considerably cleaner.

Since DBpedia normalises information into a single database, the following query can be asked without needing to know exactly which entry carries each fragment of information, and will list related genres: DBpedia has a broad scope of entities covering different areas of human knowledge.

As of September 2013[update], there are more than 45 million interlinks between DBpedia and external datasets including: Freebase, OpenCyc, UMBEL, GeoNames, MusicBrainz, CIA World Fact Book, DBLP, Project Gutenberg, DBtune Jamendo, Eurostat, UniProt, Bio2RDF, and US Census data.

Such a rich source of structured cross-domain knowledge is fertile ground for artificial intelligence systems.

The prototype incorporated the "YODIE" (Yet another Open Data Information Extraction system) service[25] developed by the University of Sheffield, which uses DBpedia to perform the annotations.

The project started in June 2010 at the Web Based Systems Group at the Free University of Berlin.

[31] Archivo also provides a four star rating scheme for the ontologies it scrapes, based on accessibility, quality, and related fitness‑for‑use criteria.

DBpedia was initiated in 2007 by Sören Auer, Christian Bizer, Georgi Kobilarov, Jens Lehmann, Richard Cyganiak and Zachary Ives.