Tag Archives: Royal Society of Chemistry

Matching ORCID and other authority control identifiers in Wikidata BEACON

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Further to my previous post on finding ORCID identifiers used in Wikidata & Wikipedia, Magnus Manske has released another useful gadget. “Wikidata BEACON” is a new tool that matches individuals’ (or other subjects’) entries in two different authority control systems. One of these, of course, can be ORCID.

For example to find people who are listed in Wikidata, and have an ORCID identifier recorded there, and who also have, say, a VIAF identifier, or a MusicBrainz artist profile, choose one of those properties, then the other, from the two drop down menus, then select “Get BEACON data”.

screenshot

Screenshot of Beacon, with ORCID and VIAF identifiers selected.

The result is returned as a pipe (“|“)-separated list, with the middle of the three columns being the Wikidata ID (in the format “Qnnn“) of the item concerned. (For the technically inclined, the format is BEACON, used to enable third party data re-users to automate the conversion of identifier values into web links. You can see the part-URLs, to which the values must be appended, at the head of the results page, labelled #PREFIX and #TARGET)

So, Bill Thompson, for instance, appears as:

4426461|Q4911143|0000-0003-4402-5296

showing respectively, his VIAF (4426461), Wikidata (Q4911143), and ORCID (0000-0003-4402-5296) identifiers

A query can also be made in the form of a URL, for example this one:

https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/beacon.php?prop=496&source=214

in which “496” is from Wikidata’s code for an ORCID identifier and “214” for a VIAF identifier.

Another example is:

https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/beacon.php?prop=661&source=373

which shows the identifiers of chemicals in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s ChemSpider database and the matching Wikimedia Commons categories.

Similarly:

https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/beacon.php?prop=827&source=345

matches the BBC and Internet Movie Database (IMDb) identifiers of television programmes.

Beacon is a good illustration of the way in which Wikidata has become a hub linking disparate datasets about people, and other things; as described by Andrew Gray in “Wikidata identifiers and the ODNB – where next?“.