Lightning Talks Session #1
Channel: LD4
Date: 2021-07-20

Wikidata as an Open and Central Hub in the Linked Data Web, Georgina Burnett and Bayan Hilles
Wikidata, Wikipedia’s sister project, is a large knowledge graph containing general purpose data about the world, collected and maintained by thousands of people. Wikidata’s data is used in a wide variety of applications from digital personal assistants to data visualisations to making Wikipedia better. But it has another super power. It connects more than 5000 catalogs, databases, social networking sites and more through identifiers and has thereby become the biggest identifier hub on the web today. This talk will dive into what this means and why it matters for you as librarians.

Wikibase What? Patricia Lampron, Myung-Ja Han, Ayla Stein-Kenfield
In an effort to improve access to content across multiple digital services, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library set out to implement a name authority system that would link resources from our next generation institutional repository and current digital library and data repository systems, as well as future repository projects for housing archival materials, to related metadata across the internet. Based on research trends in the library metadata community, a Wikibase instance was installed to store and share the library's name authority data. As they prepared to add names in the system, the presenters quickly realized that they were missing a lot of key knowledge and steps. This lightening talk will describe their journey in getting started with Wikibase, including attempting to understand the distinctions between Wikipedia, Wikidata, and a Wikibase; setting up properties and organizing metadata in our local Wikibase; and other moments that had them scratching their heads and asking “Wikibase what?!”

Opening up our data: Wikidata for Authority Control, Alicia Fagerving
The development of Wikidata as the web's central authority hub has created new opportunities for GLAM institutions wishing to make their data more visible, accessible and relevant. In this lightning talk, thte presenters will introduce the project Wikidata for Authority Control, initiated earlier this year, in which the Nationalmuseum and the National Historical Museums, in partnership with Wikimedia Sverige, explore this new area. The aim of the project is to develop and evaluate methods of linking museums' authority data to Wikidata, with the ultimate goal of making it easier for researchers and other users to find, understand and analyze relevant information distributed across different museum collections. The project includes visualisations of relations between historical persons to show the potential of otherwise abstract large amounts of data. Another aim is to increase the knowledge about Wikidata and its possibilities among GLAMs in Sweden. The presenters will focus on what they plan to achieve and how, as well as on what you need to think about before embarking on a Wikidata-driven journey to open up your data.

Bringing IIIF Manifests to life in Wikidata, Jeff Mixter, Gina Solares
Wikidata is an open knowledge base of structured data that describes any type of entity, including people, organizations, concepts, events, places, and works. Some works described in Wikidata now include a IIIF Presentation Manifest URL. In Wikidata’s default user interface, that URL appears as a link to the Manifest JSON. But Wikidata can be customized to alter the user interface and add new features. We will discuss and demonstrate a Wikidata user script that, for items that include a IIIF Presentation Manifest URL, will embed the ProjectMirador viewer and load the Manifest JSON so that the images referenced in the Manifest can be viewed in the context of other Wikidata statements about the work. The discussion will cover how the script embeds the Mirador3 viewer within a Wikidata item page and how it detects that the viewer should be added. We will also illustrate how one library is including IIIF manifests in Wikidata and about how the user script has contributed to the library's understanding of IIIF metadata and Wikidata. The demonstration will show how Wikidata user scripts are created and shared and look at ways in which Wikidata queries can uncover IIIF manifests.