There are several ways that this would benefit both Google and Wikidata.
First, we currently extract a lot of data from WP infoboxes and load that
data into Freebase which eventually makes its way into the Knowledge Graph
so linking the two datasets would make it easier for us to extract similar
data from WikiData in the future. Many other tech companies and researchers
are doing similar extraction projects from WP and Freebase so this would
benefit them as well.
Secondly, we'd like to contribute (or enable the Wikidata community to
contribute) the data that we've already extracted from WP infoboxes back to
WikiData. I'm not quite sure what the best way to do that is (pull by the
community is probably better than push by Google) but having the linkages
between equivalent concepts is an important first step to sharing more data.
Lastly, the Freebase community does a lot of work to clean up data that was
imported from WP, OpenLibrary, MusicBrainz, etc. including merging
duplicate topics and splitting apart conflated topics. This is important
but tedious work that often doesn't get pushed back to the original sources
for no other reason than there simply isn't a well-defined process for how
that should work. I'm hopeful that the WikiData community will find a way
to benefit from the cleanup that we do in Freebase creating a virtuous
cycle that improves the quality of both datasets.
On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 12:19 PM, Klein,Max <kleinm(a)oclc.org> wrote:
I commented on the property proposal thread to this
effect, so you can
answer there if you wish. I am generally supportive of creating external
identifier links (in fact I've imported .98M external IDs). Still I would
like for you to explain Google's motivations for this project, to make sure
it's simpatico.
Maximilian Klein
Wikipedian in Residence, OCLC
+17074787023
------------------------------
*From:* wikidata-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org on behalf of Shawn Simister
*Sent:* Friday, June 14, 2013 11:53 AM
*To:* Discussion list for the Wikidata project.
*Subject:* [Wikidata-l] Linking WikiData to Freebase
Would the WikiData community be interested in linking together Wikidata
pages with Freebase entities? I've proposed a new property to link the two
datasets here:
http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Property_proposal/all#Freebase_identi…
Freebase already has interwiki links for many entities so it wouldn't be
too hard to automatically determine the corresponding Wikidata pages. This
would allow people to mash up both datasets and cross-reference facts more
easily.
--
Shawn Simister
Knowledge Developer Relations
Google
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Shawn Simister
Knowledge Developer Relations
Google