I took the raw data, uploaded it to BigQuery, and made it public. So far I've done it with the 'person' and the 'place' table. Check them at https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh-bigquery:dbpedia.person.
Now is easy to know what are the most popular alma maters, for example:
SELECT COUNT(*), almaMater_label
FROM [fh-bigquery:dbpedia.person]
WHERE almaMater_label != 'NULL'
GROUP BY 2
ORDER BY 1 DESC
It's a little more complicated than that, as some people have more than one alma mater - and the particular way DBpedia encodes that. I left the complete query at http://www.reddit.com/r/bigquery/comments/1rjee7/query_wikipedia_in_bigquery_the_dbpedia_dataset/.
Btw, the top alma maters are:
494 Harvard University
320 University of Cambridge
314 University of Michigan
267 Yale University
216 Trinity College Cambridge
You can also do joins between tables.
For example, for each building (from the place table) that has an architect: What year was that architect born? How many buildings with an architect born that year are listed in DBpedia?
SELECT COUNT(*), LEFT(b.birthDate, 4) birthYear
FROM [fh-bigquery:dbpedia.place] a
JOIN EACH [fh-bigquery:dbpedia.person] b
ON a.architect = b.URI
WHERE a.architect != 'NULL'
AND birthDate != 'NULL'
GROUP BY 2
ORDER BY 2
Results:
...
8 1934
13 1935
9 1937
7 1938
17 1939
7 1941
1 1943
15 1944
10 1945
12 1946
7 1947
9 1950
20 1951
1 1952
...
(Google BigQuery has a free monthly quota to query, up to a 100GB each month) (DBpedia data from version 3.4 on is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license and the GNU Free Documentation License. http://dbpedia.org/Datasets#h338-24)