After having a chance to chat (at different times and in different
conversations) with Sylvia and Lydia, I find this project very interesting.
Being able to feed Wikidata with referenced data gathered periodically from
the World Bank database sounds useful already, but I think we could take
this initiative as a pilot for how to work with these types of
organizations.
The point where we are today with organizations hosting open data is
similar to our relationship with galleries, libraries, archives, and
museums before GLAM or Wikipedians in residence existed. Many discussions,
new precedents, tools, and processes were needed to reach the point where
we at today in GLAM, and there is still so much to do, but everybody agrees
that the effort is clearly worth.
Today we miss platform features, tools, and processes to visit (or receive
the visit) of organizations with large open datasets, hook onto their APIs,
and retrieve their interesting data. The World Bank is a potential good use
case: they provide many numbers used in infoboxes of articles of countries
which are updated manually in hundreds of Wikipedias (and in Wikidata),
they are actively interested in collaborating, and the Wikimedia Foundation
can contribute some of the "overhead" on partner relations and, if needed,
project management. With time, and if this pilot progresses well, Sylvia's
team and whoever wants to be involved could start knocking other doors. Who
knows, maybe the first generation of Wikidata-scientists in residence are
not that far off? :)
I'm tempted of proposing a #World-Bank-Data project in Phabricator if only
to lay down the basic plan, define the dependencies with Wikidata et al,
and start discussing the specifics that can be discussed today... but I
don't want to run faster than needed, so I'll wait until more people (and
specially Sylvia and Lydia) think it's a good idea.
An example of task in that project would be
On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 11:16 AM, Markus Krötzsch <
markus(a)semantic-mediawiki.org> wrote:
On 27.05.2015 10:31, Andy Mabbett wrote:
It seems to me that the biggest single useful
thing the WB (and any
other open data publisher) could do would be to include Wikidata IDs
(as URIs) in its linked data. For instance, if it refers to "Qatar",
it should do so with the URI "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q846"; if
it refers to "cotton", it should use
"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11457".
Yes, that would be great. However, please use the URIs, e.g.,
http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q846
Interesting, although I guess we will be in a better position to propose
this when we have some plan to import their data. Meanwhile, just for the
sake to refine this idea: note that WB already has
http://data.worldbank.org/country/qatar, and it would make sense for them
to link there in the first place. If you were in
http://data.worldbank.org/country/qatar, where would you expect a link to
https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q846 and with which kind of message? Or are
you suggesting something else?