This is a submission — co-authored with Dario Taraborelli — to the Force 2018 Conference taking place on 11-12 October 2018 in Montreal. It was submitted shortly prior to the extended submission deadline on May 4, 2018.
- Research Techniques
- Publishing
- Data Publishing
- Global Perspectives
- Research and Schol Comms Policy
- General - Scholarly Communication
- Other: tools and infrastructure
Wikidata, Wikibase, and a federated ecosystem of structured knowledge for open science
Please supply one paragraph describing your talk and how it relates to the theme of Engagement. (Please also declare any conflicts of interest. )
Over the past several years, interest in leveraging Wikidata as an open knowledge base has been growing in areas ranging from cultural heritage institutions and libraries to research and technology organizations. With its inherent multilinguality, human-editable interface, community-driven approach to data modeling and curation, systemic connection to Wikipedia and sister projects and alignment with the FAIR Principles for sharing data, there is an emerging consensus that Wikidata represents a significant step for turning Linked Open Data into a practical and useful technology. It provides a bridge between the many siloed knowledge bases that have emerged in the more than two decades since Tim Berners-Lee first proposed the notion of the semantic web. Despite this growing interest, there is still a fundamental lack of understanding of what Wikidata's strengths and weaknesses are, or those of Wikibase —the engine behind Wikidata. While experiments have been proliferating with the use of Wikibase, it is still very much an open question how to create a sustainable, federated ecosystem of knowledge bases to support open research, and what the social, technical, institutional barriers are towards this vision . We would like to use this session as an opportunity to identify and discuss user stories from researchers and practitioners working on open research infrastructure and understand what a model could be to get more groups onboard to design a possible path towards this vision. The presentation will be given on the basis of https://github.com/Daniel-Mietchen/events/blob/master/FORCE-2018-wikidata-wikibase.md .
The submission was filed by Dario.