Connecting up open data via Wikidata: Workshop presented by Thomas Shafee
RA-Open Access Week
Research Advantage has partnered with the University Library to deliver a series of information sessions and practical demonstrations as part of Open Access Week 2020.
What is Open Access Week? Open Access Week is a global event and an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.
Open Access to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.
Open Access (OA) has the potential to maximize research investments, increase the exposure and use of published research, facilitate the ability to conduct research across available literature, and enhance the overall advancement of scholarship. Research funding agencies, academic institutions, researchers and scientists, teachers, students, and members of the general public are supporting a move towards Open Access in increasing numbers every year. Open Access Week is a key opportunity for all members of the community to take action to keep this momentum moving forward.
Connecting up open data via Wikidata: Workshop presented by Thomas Shafee
Wikidata is an enormous multidisciplinary, multilingual knowledgebase and has become a central hub of the open data ecosystem. Whereas Wikipedia is written in prose, Wikidata is written in simple statements of subject-relationship-object, forming a network of concepts currently standing at 90 million items connected up by well over a billion links.
This workshop will interactively introduce the basics of writing to and reading from Wikidata - assuming zero coding knowledge. We will learn to read a wikidata item, and write a simple query to pull out some information from the whole database. We’ll then directly add and edit items in the database. Finally, we’ll look at some of the tools that can be used to do larger-scale and automated editing.
Thomas Shafee is a data specialist in La Trobe University, with a background in evolutionary biochemistry. His professional role focuses on open data and open research outputs across the university - ranging from data analysis and visualisation to sharing and dissemination. He also helps to run the WikiJournal User Group, a small publishing group of open access, Wikipedia-integrated academic journals, and is an experienced editor of Wikipedia and Wikidata.
Find out how you can increase the impact of your research by linking your peer reviewed open access papers to Wikipedia entries in your field.
- Date: Thursday 22 October 2020
- Time: 1-2pm
- Location: Online via Zoom
What is Research Advantage?
The Research Advantage Program is designed to foster the development of an engaged research community at the University of Newcastle, empowering academics at all career levels to reach their full potential.
The Research Advantage program currently offers 12 special initiatives which includes multi-disciplinary networking opportunities, research capability development and education opportunities, funding and scholarship opportunities.
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