This presentation reflects on my first year in a newly created Linked Data Librarian position at Middle Tennessee State University. I will discuss the creation of the role, initial expectations, and my experience learning linked data while exploring future implementations and building professional connections. The talk will highlight challenges, lessons learned, and insights gained along the way, offering a practical perspective for others beginning their own linked data journey.
The Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF) has few tools for identifying duplicates. Since February 2026, Wikiproject P244 maintenance has worked as part of the newly-founded EMCO program to use Wikidata to identify and merge more than 160 pairs of duplicate LCNAF records. This lightning talk will discuss our process, the work that remains, and how you can help, whether you can edit the name authority file or not!
Linking a place authority record to a usable geographic shape is often a manual, time-consuming step in collection management systems — yet the linked data is frequently already there. This lightning talk demos a small, open, dependency-free (Python standard library only) pipeline built for Axiell Collections at the Rijksmuseum, which takes a Wikidata QID, follows its OpenStreetMap relation (P402) or point coordinate (P625), fetches the geometry via Overpass, and converts it into a ready-to-import Axiell record — with no manual GIS work required. The real value is in the edge cases: real OpenStreetMap and Wikidata data rarely behaves as cleanly as the happy path suggests, and this talk walks through a few concrete examples of how the pipeline handles them without silently producing a wrong result. It also processes hundreds of records in a single batch, with a clear audit trail of what needs human review. These are exactly the kinds of real-world data quirks any institution connecting Wikidata/OSM to a legacy collection system will run into. Attendees will leave with a concrete, reusable pattern for this kind of linked-data-to-CMS pipeline, regardless of which collection management system they use.
The benefits of linked data in the cataloging community are often tied to improved search and discovery for library users, but in this lightning talk, I share a small use case of linked data also benefiting us, the catalogers creating the linked data. To tackle a backlog of CDs and vinyl requiring original cataloging at the UCLA Library, I worked with music catalogers to create a Python tool that could retrieve not only existing metadata from Discogs - a widely used crowdsourced music database - to generate a basic MARC record; the tool could also look beyond this database to incorporate authorized access points from the Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF) by using identifiers across Discogs, Wikidata, and LCNAF - essentially, using the linked data that we've collectively created to reduce manual effort in cataloging work. This project thus highlights how the cataloging community's investment in linked data can benefit not just our users, but also ourselves, allowing us to leverage community-created data to enhance our own metadata workflows.
For over 50 years, lawyers have used process models to describe how information and decisions move. Lexipedia, developed by the Center for Civic Innovation and the University of Virginia, describes legal processes using modern procedural standards such as BPMN (Business Process Model Notation) and Petri Nets.
Process models describe how things happen, but offer no convenient discovery mechanism. Lexipedia's latest release adds linking to pull Wikidata entries in directly, plus a QuickStatements generator for the Lexipedia Wikibase — where laws, case law, and other content not yet ready for the Wikidata ecosystem can await community review.
Linked data adds further value through specific legal ontologies: Akoma Ntoso, which correlates legal axioms across global legal systems, and deontic logic, which defines logic from language.
Cross-referencing legal concepts is self-explanatory; deontic logic is more nuanced. For example, if one MUST do something, it's implied there's a consequence for not doing it. In legal texts these statements often aren't adjacent, and get left out of models. Describing content with deontic logic lets us run a baseline "legal linting" pass that improves models and simplifies review.
See how the Georgia Tech Library designed and built a dataset of notable architecture alumni in Wikidata, for outreach and development. We will talk about the research need that led to the development of the dataset, reflect on the design and implementation challenges encountered along the way, and future plans for further development.
What does openness mean when data cannot leave a restricted environment? This lightning talk discusses how linked data principles are being adapted within the National Security Research Center (NSRC) at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where more than eighty years of secrecy have made access control a defining feature of knowledge organization.
At the NSRC, security requirements function as design parameters for semantic modeling, metadata standardization, and relationship building. These efforts support access and interoperability in an environment where data cannot be published on the open web. Here, openness takes shape through deliberate choices about what can be connected, who can follow those connections, and under what conditions.
Bridging library metadata to the semantic web sounds simple — until you're staring at a fuzzy title match and wondering whether "Emma" the Wikidata item is actually "Emma" the Jane Austen novel. This talk walks through a working pipeline that reconciles MARC records and spreadsheets against Wikidata before generating BIBFRAME RDF — deliberately in that order.
MARC's fixed fields, controlled identifiers, and $0/$1 authority links are a more reliable reconciliation substrate than post-conversion RDF would be: decades of cataloging discipline mean an ISBN or an LC name-authority code can be trusted at face value, in a way a freshly-generated triple can't yet be. Reconciling at this stage — while those signals are still intact — lets Wikidata's enormous, freely-reusable graph of works, people, and places get folded directly into the RDF as it's built, rather than bolted on after. MARC turns out to be less a legacy format to escape and more infrastructure in service of the linked data it produces.
The core mechanism is a tiered confidence system: identifiers auto-accept, fuzzy titles get a second look only when independently confirmed by author identity, and everything else is flagged rather than guessed at. I'll also cover verifying the BIBFRAME modeling itself against real production records — which caught errors theory alone missed.
This 10-minute presentation will explore how the migration to a Hyku-based platform enabled DigitalGeorgetown to transition out of a rigid hierarchy into a work-centered model due in large part to additional linked metadata fields on the new platform. I will discuss how we’re using certain fields to flatten the hierarchy and how facets are being used by an archivist to help enhance her searches. I will give a second example of how the linked metadata has changed things for stakeholders in one of our continuously growing collections.
Women across Africa remain underrepresented in digital knowledge spaces, including Wikimedia projects. Beyond the lack of content, communities also face gaps in structured data that make it difficult to discover, connect, and improve information about African women.
This lightning talk explores how Wikidata can serve as a practical, community-driven tool for addressing these visibility and discoverability gaps. Drawing from my experience as a Wikimedia volunteer working on initiatives focused on African women's representation, I will share how tools such as Wikidata Query Service and PetScan can help communities identify subjects, examine existing data, and uncover opportunities for further documentation.
Rather than presenting Wikidata solely as a technical platform, the session will highlight how volunteers can use linked data to transform scattered information into more connected and discoverable knowledge.
The talk will conclude with practical approaches that other communities can adopt to improve the representation of underrepresented people and regions in open knowledge.
