Retrospective: Google Summer of Code 2022

We received 11 project proposals for this GSoC edition.

For the 11th year in a row, we have been able to support and guide young, ambitious developers who joined us as an open source organization to work on a programming project over this summer. Each year we have been inspired by new project ideas, many amazing students, and mostly great project results that have shaped the future of DBpedia. One of the advantages of Google Summer of Code 2022 is, especially in times like these, the chance to work on projects remotely, but still obtain a first deep dive into Open Source projects like us – DBpedia. 

Meet our Google Summer of Code 2022 contributors and their projects

Throughout the summer program, our five finalists worked intensely on their challenging DBpedia projects with great outcomes to show to the public. Projects ranged from extending a neural extraction framework to enhancing DBpedia with image-based querying. If you want to have deeper insights into our GSoC contributer’s work you can find their blogs and repos in the following list. Check them out! 

• Neural Extraction Framework
• DEVELOPING A NEW DBPEDIA ABSTRACT EXTRACTOR
• Template Discovery for Neural Question Answering over DBpedia
• Enhancing DBpedia with image-based querying

We started out with five contributors that committed to GSoC projects. However, in the course of the summer, one dropped out and did not pass the final evaluation. In the end, we had four finalists that made it through the program. If you are interested in the project “Understanding and Optimizing DBpedia Question Answering through Explanations”, please check GitHub. 

Thanks to mentors

Thanks to all our mentors around the world for joining us in this endeavour, for mentoring with kindness and technical expertise. A huge shout out to those who have been by our side for so many years in a row. Thank you all again for spending over 3.5+ months working with this year’s GSoC contributors and helping them become better open source contributors!

Mentor Summit

During the previous years you might have noticed that we always organized a little lottery to decide which mentor or organization admin can join the annual GSoC mentor summit. As this year’s event will take place online, space is open to all organization admins and mentors alike. The Google Summer of Code 2022 Virtual Mentor Summit takes place on November 4, 2022 from about 8am – 12pm PT. This year we hope all our mentors will find the time to join and exchange with fellow mentors from around dozens of open source projects. 

After GSoC is before the next GSoC

We can not wait for the 2023 edition. Likewise, if you are an ambitious student who is interested in open source development and working with DBpedia you are more than welcome to either contribute your own project idea or apply for project ideas we offer starting in early 2023. If you would like to know where previous mentors and contributors are now working, please read our GSoC blog post about the last 10 years of DBpedia at GSoC. 

In case you like to mentor a project do not hesitate to also get in touch with us via dbpedia@infai.org. 

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Emma & Julia

on behalf of the DBpedia Association