Hello,

we here at Bibnet (a government agency working for public libraries) in Brussels greatly admire your work on the Wikidata project! Thanks to the addition of Wikidata indentifiers to the viaf.org project, we finally will be able to relate the personal names in our library catalog to Wikipedia.

What we do now (without identifiers): 
We use the Wikipedia API to query the ’titles’ parameter, based on the name of an author in our database. Lots of things can go wrong of course.

Example query:
http://nl.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=pageprops%7Cinfo%7Cextracts%7Clinks%7Cpageimages&redirects&format=json&explaintext&continue&exchars=1000&exsectionformat=plain&format=json&titles=Dimitri_Verhulst&pithumbsize=150&callback=jQuery17208731340558733791_1432116510465

Result in our library catalog (AquaBrowser software):
http://zbb.staging.aquabrowser.be/?q=author:%22Dimitri%20Verhulst%22&uilang=en

What we want to do (with identifiers):
Keep on using the Wikipedia api (because then there are no costs for extra development), but query for a Wikidata identifier (I believe it is called wikibase_item). I only find pageids as a parameter on http://nl.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=query. Is querying for a Wikidata identifier possible? If not, what is a possible workaround?

Thank you,

Johan

Johan Mijs 
Technology Manager

 
johan.mijs@bibnet.be 
+32 (0)2 213 10 27 
+32 (0)473 81 78 70 
skype:johanmijs

Bibnet vzw 
www.bibnet.be 
Priemstraat 51 
B-1000 Brussel