Max et al,
I'm glad your brought up this opportunity for wikidata to work with OCLC. An issue
that I haven't seen adequately discussed on the list yet is how citation/source data
is expected to be represented in wikidata.
There is a great opportunity for wikidata to help fix one of the biggest structured data
problems that have afflicted Wikipedia, i.e. the lack of dedicated support for citations,
which are currently represented via templates (in the best scenario) or raw links (in the
most common scenario). Having citation support built into wikidata with the ability to
represent sources themselves as entities, and associate them with the appropriate unique
identifiers when available (ISBN, DOI, PMID, ArXiV IDs etc) would allow us to fix many of
the outstanding limitations of the current lack of support for citations in Wikipedia.
A central, canonical repository for all sources used as citations across WIkimedia
projects (including WikiData itself) would allow us to:
• simplify the maintenance of citations in WIkimedia projects
• avoid the proliferation of templates in Wikipedia articles and allow citations to be
referred to by unique keys
• expose citation data in both human and machine-readable format (enabling the possibility
to export records in various formats like RIS, bibtex, EndNote or format them using CSL
[1])
• support collaboration around sources – this is one of the most exciting (and promising)
recent trends in collaboration in Wikipedia
• measure usage of sources across languages and projects (in particular measuring the use
of open access/libre materials)
• allow editors to annotate the relation between sources or between sources and factual
statements using citation typing ontologies such as CiTO [2]
Some of these goals are the same the WikiCite project is trying to achieve [3] but there
are different communities, projects and organizations out there that would benefit for a
source repository hosted in Wikidata: just to name a few, acawiki, the altmetrics project,
OKFN's open blbliography project.
Citation data could be seeded from data parsed from Wikipedia itself as well as open
bibliographic databases such as WorldCat (for monographs) or the CC-BY licensed Mendeley
catalogue (for scholarly papers) (licensing issues are important but IMO not
insurmountable).
Hope to see a good discussion on this topic at the Wikidata summit/hackathon in the next
couple of days.
Dario
[1]
Hi Max,
thank you for the pointer! I am very excited about the idea of working together with a
project like OCLC! We had a discussion on IRC in the office hour, and I just want to point
to the answers there, as soon as the logs are up.
Let us make an appointment for Wikimania, and if you have follow ups, let us know!
Cheers,
Denny
2012/5/25 Klein,Max <kleinm(a)oclc.org>
Hello Wikidata Wizards,
Phoebe Ayers from the Board recommended I talk to you. My name is Max Klein and I am the
Wikipedian in Residence for OCLC. OCLC owns
Worldcat.org the world’s largest holder of
Library data at 264 million bibliographic records about books, journals and other library
items. We would really like to partner with you as Wikidata is being built, in
incorporating our data into your project.
What we can offer:
·
WorldCat.org metadata
http://www.worldcat.org/ .
o Typically, for any work we have most of the following: title, authors, publisher,
formats, summaries, editions, subjects, languages, intended audience, all associated
ISBNs, length, and abstract.
· APIs to this data
http://oclc.org/developer/
o And some other cool APIs like xISBN which returns all the ISBNs of all the editions
of book on the input of any single one.
· Library finding tools
o When viewing a record on our site, we show you the closest library which has that
work, and links to reserve it for pick-up.
· The Virtual International Authority File (VIAF)
http://viaf.org/, which is an
Authoritative Disambiguation file
o That means that we have certified data on disambiguation of Authors
· WorldCat Identities, an Analytics site
http://www.worldcat.org/identities/
o It gives you for Author metadata and analytics: Alternative names, significant
dates, publication timelines, genres, roles, related authors, and tag clouds of associated
subjects.
What’s in it for us:
· We are a not-for-profit member cooperative. Our mission is “Connecting people
to knowledge through library cooperation.”
· Since I work at the research group, for now this is just a research project.
o If at some point this goes live - and you want to - we’d like to integrate the “find
it at a library near me” feature, that means click-throughs for us.
The ideas:
There are a lot of possibilities, and I’d like to hear your input. These are the first
few that I’ve can come up with.
· Making infoboxes for each book or author that contains all their metadata.
o Ready to incorporate into all language projects.
· Using authority files to disambiguate or link works to their creators.
o Solving DABs
· Using our analytics (e.g. author timelines) as Wikidata data types to
transclude.
o Curating articles with easy to include dynamic analytics
· Populating or creating works/author pages with their algorithmically-derived
history and details.
o Extremely experimental semantic work.
I’m roaring and ready to get this collaboration going. I know Wikidata is at an early
stage, and we are willing to accommodate you.
Send me any feedback or ideas,
Max Klein
Wikipedia in Residence
kleinm(a)oclc.org
+17074787023
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