Data extension protocol and linking to other reconciliation services

Hi all,

I have been thinking about the following scenario:

Say I have reconciled some data to Wikidata. I can now fetch data from
the corresponding items via the data extension protocol. Among others, I
could fetch GND identifiers. But it turns out that there is a
reconciliation service for GND, which also supports data extension, so I
can fetch other properties from them in turn.

At the moment, the Wikidata reconciliation service is not aware of that:
when it returns GND ids, it returns them as bare strings. The user must
know that there is a GND service to extend their data further.

I am thinking that it would be nice if the Wikidata service could
announce the GND service in the column metadata it returns, such that
the resulting column is automatically considered as reconciled to that
service when it is fetched in OpenRefine.

Currently, reconciliation services can already return reconciled values
in the data extension protocol, but it is assumed that these are
reconciled values for the same service. They can announce which type of
entities this corresponds to, but that is assumed to be a type in the
same reconciliation service.

We could potentially extend that metadata to include a reconciliation
service URI, such that the resulting column would be reconciled to this
other service. It would provide a sort of federation mechanism between
reconciliation endpoints.

Thoughts?

Antonin

Received on Wednesday, 24 June 2020 13:05:21 UTC