Exploring Canadiana: A Use Case for Wikidata - Hanging Together

"My colleagues Jean Godby, Karen Smith-Yoshimura, and Bruce Washburn, along with a host of partners, have just released Creating Library Linked Data with Wikibase: Lessons Learned from Project Passage, a fascinating account of their experiences working with a customized instance of Wikibase to create resource descriptions in the form of linked data. In the spirit of their report, I’d like to offer a modest yet illustrative use case showing how access to the relationships and properties of the linked data in another Wikibase environment – Wikidata – smoothed the way for OCLC Research’s recent study of the Canadian presence in the published record.

Maple Leaves: Discovering Canada Through the Published Record is the latest in a series of OCLC Research studies that explore national contributions to the world’s accumulated body of published materials. A national contribution is defined as materials published in, about, and/or by the people of that country. The last category presents a special challenge: how to assemble a list of entities – people and organizations – associated with a particular country from which authors, musicians, film makers, and other creators of published works can be identified?..."