providing an additional data source offering more information on a given concept. This work was done in two parts: a wiki editor affiliated with a library institution proposed a new property in Wikidata to accommodate SNAC identifiers; and another wiki editor created a procedure to match SNAC constellations with existing Wikidata items. The proposed property, SNAC Ark ID,63 underwent a community review process and was later added to the knowledge base. With the new property in place, the matching of constellations to existing Wikidata items resulted in the addition of about 128,000 SNAC IDs to the knowledge base. Since that time, the property has continued to be used by Wikidata editors, with additional matches and corrections being undertaken.
Europeana, the EU digital platform for cultural heritage, has called on libraries and other cultural heritage institutions to add their identifiers and vocabularies to Wikidata as a way for Europeana to pull them into their system. Wikidata was identified as a priority area for Europeana, and having more libraries using Wikidata as a linking hub strengthens the overall structure of semantic information about cultural heritage collections.64
The Smithsonian Institution is running an Open Data Pilot that focuses on contributing open data about the institutional collections to Wikidata. Because the Smithsonian is a multidisciplinary organization, the collection and management of the identities within their content management platforms has considerable challenges—including, for example, reconciling identities and data models across different disciplines. As part of this pilot for regularizing and building a model for impact around linked open data, the Smithsonian is developing two data sets: one in the sciences (Natural History Specimens) and one in the humanities (Artworks).65 Some of this experimentation will be paired with the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Initiative as a series of digital innovation initiatives that work across institutional boundaries within the Smithsonian.
