Wikidata as a Linking Hub for Knowledge Organization Systems? Integrating an Authority Mapping into Wikidata and Learning Lessons for KOS Mappings

Wikidata has been created in order to support all of the roughly 300 Wikipedia projects. Besides interlinking all Wikipedia pages about a specific item – e.g., a person in different languages, it also connects to more than 1500 different sources of authority information. We will present lessons learned from using Wikidata as a linking hub for two personal name authorities in economics (GND and RePEc author identifiers) and demonstrate the benefits of moving a mapping from a closed environment to Wikidata as a public and community-curated linking hub. We will further ask to what extent these experiences can be transferred to knowledge organization systems and how the limitation to simple 1:1 relationships (as for authorities) can be overcome. Using STW Thesaurus for Economics as an example, we will investigate how we can make use of existing cross-concordances to “seed” Wikidata with external identifiers, and how transitive mappings to yet unmapped vocabularies can be earned.