Google keynote: Improving knowledge availability for Buddhist entities through Wikidata
10-29, 20:25–20:55 (UTC), Livestream room

The Tibetan heritage is important and the data volume is extremely rich. They came from 1000+ years of studies of Buddhism and other sciences, holding ancient Indian academic traditions. There are efforts within Universities and Institutes trying to digitize some of the most important content. However, their information is not easily discovered by the general public.

People find it difficult to find some very basic information on search engines even about some very famous people and places (such as Buddhist masters and monasteries). Through collaborating with the largest Tibetan digital archive, BDRC (Buddhist Digital Resource Center), we used Python + OpenRefine to import people and place entities with names and aliases, along with entity relations and improved search result pages and discoverability of those entities.

Some possible ideas are summarized on where to go next to improve the usability of Wikidata to preserve Tibetan treasuries and other valuable heritages of mankind.


Link to notes

https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/WikidataCon2021-GoogleKeynote

What will the participants take away from this session?

The Tibetan heritage is important and the data volume is extremely rich. They came from 1000+ years of studies of Buddhism and other sciences, holding ancient Indian academic traditions. There are efforts within Universities and Institutes trying to digitize some of the most important content. However, their information is not easily discovered by the general public.

People find it difficult to find some very basic information on search engines even about some very famous people and places (such as Buddhist masters and monasteries). Through collaborating with the largest Tibetan digital archive, BDRC (Buddhist Digital Resource Center), we used Python + OpenRefine to import people and place entities with names and aliases, along with entity relations and improved search result pages and discoverability of those entities.

Some possible ideas are summarized on where to go next to improve the usability of Wikidata to preserve Tibetan treasuries and other valuable heritages of mankind.

Language

English

Recording

Yes