Extracting, Evaluating, and Enhancing Metadata for Institutional Researchers in Wikidata

Presenter Information

Rachana Kulkarni, Oklahoma State University - Main CampusFollow
Dani Kirsch, Oklahoma State University - Main CampusFollow

Presentation Type

Lightning Talk

Location

Teams.

Start Date

8-4-2025 2:00 PM

End Date

8-4-2025 2:20 PM

Description

Open, non-proprietary persistent identifiers and their associated metadata are invaluable sources of information regarding researchers, research products, and research impact. Our project made use of ORCID iDs and Wikidata IDs (QIDs) to identify researchers at our institution who have a Wikidata profile. We searched the Wikidata database and extracted QIDs that had an ORCID iD from one of our researchers listed as an external identifier. Next, we extracted metadata from each researcher’s QID, resulting in a list of contributed properties and values. We processed these data, focusing on verifying that individuals were correctly affiliated with our institution, determining frequently occurring properties and values, and selecting properties that would be valuable to add to Wikidata entries. Our institution has a Research Information Management System that provides researchers with an institutional profile containing information about their publications, teaching, and other scholarly endeavors. We plan to create a custom property in Wikidata that will enable us to add a new external identifier to researchers’ Wikidata profiles that links back to their institutional profile. This presentation will overview our methods for extracting Wikidata metadata, the data cleaning and verification process, and the progress we have made in contributing new information to researchers’ Wikidata profiles.

Author Bios

Rachana Kulkarni is a graduate research assistant with the Research and Learning Services Department at the Oklahoma State University Libraries, working closely with professors on data-driven research projects. Her work focuses on analyzing datasets, developing visualization strategies, and applying business intelligence techniques to generate meaningful insights. She is passionate about leveraging data to drive informed decision-making and support academic research.

Dani Kirsch is the Research Data Services Librarian at the Oklahoma State University Libraries. Much of her work involves providing research and data support to faculty, staff, and students and finding ways of harnessing open data and metadata from databases (such as those maintained by DataCite and Wikidata) to explore and enhance research and data sharing at her institution.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.