Discovery with Linked Open Data: Leveraging Wikidata for Context and Exploration

Wikidata has been touted for its potential to be an authority linking hub as it provides the mechanism to connect to a few thousand different types of external identifiers, i.e. concepts from different thesauri and controlled vocabularies (Neubert, 2017). Common vocabularies like VIAF, ISNI, LCSH, LCNAF, FAST, AAT, ULAN, GeoNames, etc. have been, at least, partially mapped to Wikidata. How can cultural heritage institutions leverage this foundation built by Wikidata to enhance the discovery experience of users? The subject knowledge cards available for all items in the Michigan State University Libraries digital repository utilize the URIs of subject terms in metadata records as an entry point to connect to rich linkages provided in Wikidata entries. The card captures contextual information of the subject in focus by pulling information from Wikidata and linked DBpedia. It also provides links to semantically related resources from the library catalog and selected scholarly databases by using Wikidata as an interchange to trace equivalent concepts used in different systems. With linkages to external resources, users are no longer confined to a single silo but able to navigate an integrated network of resources beyond the immediate system