Title: Adding COVID information to Wikidata

Speaker: Jose Emilio Labra Gayo and Andra Waagmeester

Abstract

In this lecture we will describe how a team of multidisciplinary researchers met online during the ongoing pandemic to enrich Wikidata with knowledge on COVID19, SARS-COV2 and coronaviruses in general. The resulting protocol [1] is based on pipelines developed in the Gene Wiki project [2] and Shape Expressions [3]. The Gene Wiki project, which is a research project that aims at adding public knowledge on genes, proteins, related diseases and related compounds to Wikidata and by extension the Semantic Web. Shape Expressions is a concise and formal language to describe and validate RDF data. Since 2019, Wikidata supports Shape Expressions in their EntitySchema extension. We will describe what Shape Expressions are, how they can be used in Wikidata and explore some related tools.
  1. A protocol for adding knowledge to Wikidata: aligning resources on human coronaviruses
  2. Science Forum: Wikidata as a knowledge graph for the life sciences
  3. Validating RDF


Slides

Bio

Andra Waagmeester is an independent researcher and founder of Micelio, a small research consultancy. Andra has a background in biomedical informatics. Micelio is involved in various linked data projects in biomedical informatics, biodiversity informatics and the cultural heritage. The common denominators in these projects are semantic modelling, FAIR data, Wikidata and general semantic web approaches. One notable example is the Gene Wiki project where public knowledge on genes, proteins, related diseases and chemical compounds is semantically modelled and aligned with Wikidata, the public linked data repository of Wikipedia. This allows rapid interoperability of this knowledge with not only all the language editions of Wikipedia, but any linked data consumer. Andra is the current chair of the Shape Expression community group.
Jose Emilio Labra Gayo is an Associate Professor at the University of Oviedo, Spain. He founded WESO (Web Semantics Oviedo) research group in 2004, which collaborates with different companies and institutions applying semantic technologies. The development of data portals for several companies and institutions led to his interest in RDF validation. He was a member of the W3C Data Shapes working group and of the W3C community groups: Shape Expressions and SHACL. He is the coauthor of the Validating RDF data book and maintains the ShEx and SHACL library SHaclEX as well as the online tools RDFShape and wikishape. Previously, he was coordinator of the Master in Web Engineering and Dean of the School of Computer Science Engineering - University of Oviedo (2004-2012).