From Wikidata to Scholia: Creating Structured-Linked Data to Generate Scholarly Profiles

Abstract

Wikidata, the newest project of the Wikimedia Foundation, has been increasingly attracting contributors from all over the world. Wikidata is a free knowledge base that stores multilingual structured linked data. At the IUPUI University Library, we are working on a project where our goal is to provide a presence in Wikidata for our faculty members. As we will demonstrate, adding data about our faculty will enable us to generate scholarly profiles for them. For the pilot project, we selected 18 faculty members from the IU Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. The School of Philanthropy, located in the IUPUI campus, is the first school dedicated solely to philanthropy education and research. The school and its faculty also provide many widely used works of scholarship. We approached this project by using Wikidata as the repository for all the data associated with the faculty members. We created entries (namely Items in Wikidata) for the selected group of faculty, their co-authors, and all their published articles with DOIs. To create entries for the articles, we used a tool that allows users to enter either a DOI, PMID or PMCID and generates the Items directly in Wikidata. We then used Scholia, an open source application, to generate the scholarly profiles. Scholia queries Wikidata and presents the user with aggregated and graphically-displayed information. It also enables us, for example, to learn more about our faculty members’ collaborators and scholarly interests. In addition to demonstrating our methods for contributing content to a structured linked data knowledge base, this presentation will share the potential benefits and challenges for libraries to consider. Libraries have both the expertise and data sources to take a leading role in contributing to and promoting open knowledge projects for their communities.