Lightning Talk at ELAG 2016 (http://elag2016.org)

1. Using Wikidata as an Authority
for the SowiDataNet Research Data Repository
Joachim Neubert
ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, Kiel/Hamburg
Lightning Talk
ELAG 2016, Kopenhagen
9.6.2016

2. Geographical scope of research:
small piece of controlled metadata
• SowiDataNet: Subject data repository on social sciences and
economics
• Several subject specific knowledge organization systems
• Entities for geographical areas are not subject specific at all
• Create a custom authority? We need
• Countries
• States in Germany
• „European Union“, and possibly other multinational political unions
• Geographical Regions (which are not administrative units – e.g.
„Eastern Germany“)
Page 2

3. All of this is in Wikidata!
Page 3
• … and by a custom query we can precisely get access to and select
from the required portion of the data items
• What we gain:
• Identifiers
• Labels in multiple languages
• Links to lots of other identifiers
• An abundance of information from Wikipedia
• Updates of the underlying data by the community
• Open edit interface for contributing own improvements to Wikidata
• … with minimal cost and effort

4. Page 4Query link
Query for autosuggest list
of Wikidata items