I am in the process of creating a better way to map CSL types to Wikidata types together with Jakob Voß, and while listing all subtypes of web page, I came across a number of these cases (link): #defaultView:Graph SELECT ?a ?aLabel ?b ?bLabel WHERE { wd:Q58803899 wdt:P279* ?a . ?a wdt:P279 ?b . FILTER EXISTS { ?b wdt:P279* wd:Q386724 . } SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". } } I’m no expert on

I spent last week in Ottawa at a "Ecobiomics" hackathon organised by Joel Sachs. Essentially we spent a week exploring the application of linked data to various topics in biodiversity, with an emphasis on looking at working examples.

Citation.js has supported Wikidata input for a long time. However, I’ve always had some trouble with the API.

David Shorthouse (@dpsspiders) makes some very cool things, and his latest project World Taxonomists & Systematists is a great example of using automation to assemble a list of the world's taxonomists and systematists. The project uses ORCID.

A Do-A-Thon event took place at the SUB on the 14th and 15th February that brought members from the Göttingen Campus and the Wikidata community together in order to dive into the world of Wikidata and pilot projects. For a research library a knowledge base like Wikidata should be of particular interest.

For my own use more than anything else I've started creating a list of Wikidata SPARQL queries here. I personally don't find Wikidata's data model particularly easy to grasp, so one way to learn is to take the example queries on the Wikidata Query site and mess about with them. For those interested in taxonomic data Wikidata is quite rich in content.

Last week I was at WikiCite 2017, a fascinating three day event in Vienna. Wikicite is "a proposal to build a bibliographic database in Wikidata to serve all Wikimedia projects", and is attracting increasing attention from academics, librarians, publishers, data geeks, and others. You can get a sense of the project by following @WikiCite on Twitter.

Following on from previous posts The Semantic Web made fun: d3sparql and The Biodiversity Heritage Library meets Wikidata via Wikispecies: adding author identifiers to BioStor I've put together an example query that can be used to extract a taxonomic classification from Wikidata.

This week, the big achievement is the addition of a multi-step form to add the semantic triples from last week to Wikidata with QuickStatements, which we talked about before too. The new '+' icon in table rows now links to a page where you can curate the statement and add Wikidata IDs where necessary. At the last step, you get a table of the existing data, the added identifiers and soon their Wikidata label.

David Schindel and colleagues recently published a paper in the Biodiversity Data Journal : The paper is a call for the community to help grow a database (GRBio) on biodiversity repositories, a database that will "will require community input and curation". Reading this, I'm struck by the lack of a clear sense of what that community might be. In particular: who is this database for, and who is most likely to build it? I suspect that