Page:ARL White Paper on Wikidata Opportunities and Recommendations.pdf/15

 * Enhancing metadata and discovery
 * Advocating for open bibliographic data and open metadata exchange
 * Promoting greater visibility and reach of institutional research and scholarship (the inside-out library) through its open citation corpus
 * Sustainability of the open approach for libraries

From the earliest discussions of the semantic web, librarians along with other academic communities have been looking for practical pathways to connect dispersed knowledge on the internet. Linked data uses data “triples” (subject-predicate-object) that connect two different concepts (subject and object) with a predefined concept relationship (a predicate). With these relationships, a growing number of items become connected into an expanding graph of interrelated concepts, which can be traversed, and in turn represented, through computational processes and human exploration. Navigation of these growing networks of concepts allows for a serendipitous series of relationships. Queries of these concepts can lead to much more human answers to questions like “Which authors were born in a specific town?” or “Which authors of papers in our collection were PhD candidates at the same university?”

But the technical approach to creating linked data is challenging. The findings of OCLC’s 2015 survey of linked data implementers in the library world indicated that the principal motivations for publishing linked data were learning and experimentation, exposing data to a larger audience on the web, and improving discovery of local content by search engines. Among the most cited barriers to publishing linked data were “steep learning curve for staff,” “little documentation or advice on how to build the systems,” “lack of tools,” “restrictive or unclear licenses,” and “ascertaining who owns the data.”34

But by 2018, Wikidata rose from the 15th most used linked data source (9% of surveyed projects) in 2015 to the 5th most used linked ARL White Paper on Wikidata: Opportunities and Recommendations