Hey everyone,
Wikidata’s birthday is still a few days away but since there are no deployments on Sundays here is early birthday present number 2 ;-)
One of Wikidata’s most important but often under-appreciated areas is the external identifiers. They link Wikidata with by now more than 2000 databases, knowledge bases, catalogs and more. External identifiers allow people and machines access to more information about a given topic and help identify the same concept in other databases.
The identifier can often be expanded to a full URI. (For example, LoC ID n81114174 becomes http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n81114174.) This full URI can then be used in the linked open data web to match our data with other datasets and use both of them together easily.
From today on, Wikidata has full URIs for statements that represent
external identifiers in its RDF exports, and thereby becomes a proper citizen of the linked open data web. To make this work the property for the external ID needs to have a statement with property “URI used in RDF” (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1921). I’m looking forward to seeing what new things are going to be built with this and how we will show up on http://lod-cloud.net.
Cheers Lydia
PS: It will take a reload of the query service to also have the full URIs included there for all items. This should happen in the first two weeks of November. (Tracking is in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T176593) Until then only newly added or edited items will have the full URIs added to the query service.