[DCRM-L] FW: MetaMan IG: Exciting News! VIAF Moving from Harvesting English WIkipedia to Wikidata!

[Schneider, Nina]

Of potential interest.

Nina


+---------------
Nina M. Schneider
Rare Books Librarian
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
2520 Cimarron Street
Los Angeles, CA  90018
(323) 731-8529

nschneider at humnet.ucla.edu
http://www.clarklibrary.ucla.edu/

** Please note that the Clark Library will be CLOSED for our seismic retrofit beginning in April 2015 **
****************************************************************************



From: Riemer, John
Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2015 10:55 AM
To: All Library Staff
Subject: FW: MetaMan IG: Exciting News! VIAF Moving from Harvesting English WIkipedia to Wikidata!

For those interested in linked data, this is a major new development in connecting identities to many international forms of name.

   John

From: Smith-Yoshimura,Karen [mailto:smithyok at oclc.org]
Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2015 8:13 AM
Subject: MetaMan IG: Exciting News! VIAF Moving from Harvesting English WIkipedia to Wikidata!

Dear OCLC Research Library Partners Metadata Management Interest Group -
We've had links between VIAF and the English Wikipedia for some time. But now we'll be harvesting personal and organizational names from Wikidata, which in turn links to all Wikipedia's in different languages! My colleague Thom Hickey has blogged about this in his Outgoing blog, Moving to Wikidata<http://outgoing.typepad.com/outgoing/2015/03/moving-to-wikidata.html>.

Besides the additional names that are being harvested, I am really excited about now harvesting names in their non-Latin script forms that are available in WorldCat, authority files and VIAF only in romanized form.  Using Thom's Jane Austen example in his blog post, we could present her name in Bengali, Chuvash, Georgian, Macedonian, Malayalam, Marathi, Mongolian, Nepali, Panjabi, Pashto, Serbian, Tamil, Tajik, Tatar, Thai, and Urdu scripts - most of which are represented only by romanizations in WorldCat and our current authority files, if at all. That's potentially really cool.

Thom notes that the new data will appear in VIAF in mid to late April but we can see the changes now in http://test.viaf.org<http://test.viaf.org/>. There I can see the Gujarati form of Gandhi's name, as harvested from Wikidata:

[cid:image002.jpg at 01D0679C.98F11580]

If you look at the "about" section of the record, you can see an impressive list of the Wikipedia pages in lots of different languages for Gandhi.

Hope you enjoy looking at this new source of data as much as I do!

Cheers,

Karen
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