Sebastian Schaffert
Sebastian Schaffert is leading the Information Retrieval SRE team as Engineering Director, responsible for managing the indexing pipelines and search indexes powering all major Google products, including Search, Geo, Youtube and the Knowledge Graph. He and his team are facing unique challenges every day, working on one of the planet's largest information systems. Previously, Sebastian was leading the Meet and Calendar SRE teams and worked on scaling Meet 100x.
He also has a background in research on Semantic Web, Databases and Reasoning, and is one of the main contributors to Apache Marmotta. He previously worked as Head of Knowledge and Media Technologies at Salzburg Research and as CTO of Redlink GmbH in Salzburg, Austria. Sebastian received a PhD from the University of Munich, Germany in 2004 in the area of Programming and Modelling Languages.
He also has a background in research on Semantic Web, Databases and Reasoning, and is one of the main contributors to Apache Marmotta. He previously worked as Head of Knowledge and Media Technologies at Salzburg Research and as CTO of Redlink GmbH in Salzburg, Austria. Sebastian received a PhD from the University of Munich, Germany in 2004 in the area of Programming and Modelling Languages.
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From Freebase to Wikidata: The Great Migration
Thomas Pellissier Tanon
Denny Vrandečić
Lydia Pintscher
World Wide Web Conference, ACM (2016)
Preview abstract
Collaborative knowledge bases that make their data freely available in a machine-readable form are central for the data strategy of many projects and organizations. The two major collaborative knowledge bases are Wikimedia’s Wikidata and Google’s Freebase. Due to the success of Wikidata, Google decided in 2014 to offer the content of Freebase to the Wikidata community. In this paper, we report on the ongoing transfer efforts and data mapping challenges, and provide an analysis of the effort so far. We describe the Primary Sources Tool, which aims to facilitate this and future data migrations. Throughout the migration, we have gained deep insights into both Wikidata and Freebase, and share and discuss detailed statistics on both knowledge bases.
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