Re: [Wikitech-l] [Wikimedia Technical Talks] Beyond Wikipedia - Knowledge that even a computer can understand

Hi Everyone, It's time for Wikimedia Tech Talks 2020 Episode 5! *This talk will take place next Wednesday on 22 July 2020 at 17:00 UTC.* *Title:* Beyond Wikipedia - Knowledge that even a computer can understand *Speaker*: Zbyszko Papierski, Senior Software Engineer <https://wikimediafoundation.org/profile/zbyszko-papierski/> *Summary:* Everybody knows what Wikipedia is, right? This magnificent source of knowledge has been helping countless people with their everyday lives for nearly two decades. Whether you want to know how to calculate the circumference of the circle, whether hyenas are pack animals or what really happened to the Ottoman Empire - Wikipedia’s got your back. Well, unless you happen to be a computer. One issue with Wikipedia is that knowledge there isn’t very well structured. There are links to other pages, sure - but unless you actually understand the text, you won’t understand what the link actually is. This is, of course, a field day for AI/ML experts - and there are a lot of people already scavenging Wikipedia for any meaningful relations. Fortunately, this is not the only way. Enter Wikidata - Wikipedia’s younger sister. Wikidata is also a source of knowledge curated and provided by a community of volunteers but presented in a relational graph format. Structuring the knowledge has huge ramifications - it not only makes it easier to digest by software but also allows you to infer new knowledge. There are different ways for developers to interact with Wikidata, but we’ll focus on Wikidata Query Service - a service my team is responsible for. It provides a queryable interface - using an RDF graph language called SPARQL (not to be confused with a hundred other things in IT with “spark” in the name). Let’s do some discovery! *The link to the Youtube Livestream can be found here: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNNy8ALGjaE During the live talk, you are invited to join the discussion on IRC at #wikimedia-office You can browse past Tech Talks here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Tech_talks If you are interested in giving your own tech talk, you can learn more here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Calendar/How_to_schedule_an_event#Te… Note: This is a public talk. Feel free to distribute through appropriate email and social channels! Kindly, Sarah R. Rodlund Senior Technical Writer, Developer Advocacy <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Developer_Advocacy> srodlund(a)wikimedia.org