Linking knowledge organization systems via Wikidata

Abstract

Wikidata is a large collaboratively curated knowledge base, which connects all of the roughly 300 Wikipedia projects in different languages and provides common data for them. Its items also link to more than 1500 different sources of authority information. Wikidata can therefore serve as a linking hub for the authorities and knowledge organization systems represented by these “external identifiers”. In the past, this approach has been applied successfully to rather straight-forward cases such as personal name authorities. Knowledge organization systems with more abstract concepts are more challenging due to, e.g., partial overlaps in meaning and different granularities of concepts.