OpenStreetMap and Wikidata: Awesome Together

Room: Mathematikon C

Monday, 09:30

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Workshop presentation slides

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  • Eugene Alvin Villar
  • Edward Betts

OpenStreetMap and Wikidata are two of the largest crowdsourced open data projects on the Internet. While OSM and Wikipedia, the more well-known sister project of Wikidata, are often compared with each other (e.g., “OSM is like Wikipedia for maps”), OSM and Wikidata are actually even more similar. OSM has things like nodes, ways, relations, tags, keys, and values, while Wikidata has similar concepts like items, statements, properties, values, and qualifiers. Data modeling discussions on the OSM tagging mailing list are often as passionate as similar discussions on the Wikidata project chat page. Since Wikidata was created in 2012, there have been plenty of links, projects, and collaborations between the two volunteer communities. This includes data links (such as OSM's wikidata=* tag and Wikidata's P402 or "OSM relation ID" property), to projects like Sophox which is a SPARQL endpoint that provides access to OSM and Wikidata, and to things like installing the Wikibase extension—the software that powers Wikidata—to the OSM Wiki in order to provide structured data for OSM keys and tags.

This workshop is intended to provide participants with an introduction to Wikidata and how to contribute to it, how OSM and Wikidata compare and contrast with each other, and examples of projects or initiatives that combine OSM and Wikidata. The workshop will also teach participants how to use an online tool that lets mappers generate a list of candidate matches between OSM and Wikidata within a specified a place or region, which are then reviewed by the mapper and saved to OSM as wikidata=* tags. The final part of the workshop is intended to be a discussion of ways the two open communities can collaborate with each other including tackling the issues that prevent further collaborations (such as license compatibility).