A Linked Data wrapper for CrunchBase

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Färber, Michael^{; *} | Menne, Carsten | Harth, Andreas

Affiliations: Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Institute AIFB, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. E-mail: michael.faerber@kit.edu.

Abstract: CrunchBase is a database about startups and technology companies. The database can be searched, browsed, and edited via a website, but is also accessible via an entity-centric HTTP API in JSON format. We present a wrapper around the API that provides the data as Linked Data. The wrapper provides schema-level links to schema.org, Friend-of-a-Friend and Vocabulary-of-a-Friend, and entity-level links to DBpedia for organization entities. We describe how to harvest the RDF data to obtain a local copy of the data for further processing and querying that goes beyond the access facilities of the CrunchBase API. Further, we describe the cases in which the Linked Data API for CrunchBase and the crawled CrunchBase RDF data have been used in other works.

Keywords: Linked Data, CrunchBase, RDF, API, startups

DOI: 10.3233/SW-170278

Journal: Semantic Web, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 505-515, 2018