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talk · Tuesday 22 September · 14:30–⁠14:45 · SAL B

Here, There, and Everywhere: Modelling Research Expeditions in Wikidata

Sabine von Mering · Responsible AI, Open Digital Curation, and Round-Tripping for Biodiversity Data

Recording time 5:58:30–6:12:56Open on Vimeo ↗

Summaries and key moments are machine-produced. Check the recording for the speaker’s exact words.

The short versionTreat research expeditions as first-class entities with Wikidata identifiers so distributed specimens, people, publications and archives can be linked.

Overview

What this was about

Sabine von Mering presented on behalf of the TDWG Research Expeditions task group (Collection Descriptions Interest Group). Expedition data are fragmented across institutions and lack persistent identifiers, hindering provenance and historical, including colonial, contextualisation. The group has a draft definition of a research expedition, promotes Wikidata QIDs as identifiers for expedition parent events, and proposes a lightweight, extensible Wikidata schema with minimum properties, links to holding collections and archives, and knowledge-graph visualisation (e.g. Scholia for the Harriman Alaska Expedition). Recommendations: create or enrich expedition items, use minimum properties, and record QIDs in collection management systems.

Why it matters. Improves discoverability and provenance of expedition-derived collections and supports historical and colonial-context research.

Key ideas

In the room

  • Expeditions were often transdisciplinary, so specimens, ethnographic objects and archives are scattered across institutions.
  • The terms research/scientific expedition are not unproblematic given colonial, economic and military entanglements.
  • Working definition: an organised, time-bounded field activity by one or more people at one or more locations, affiliated with an institution, for research purposes, distinct from routine collecting (still a draft).
  • In GBIF an expedition can be an event, linked via parentEventID; some datasets already use Wikidata QIDs; longer-term explicit Darwin Core support is being considered alongside DwC-DP.
  • Minimum recommended Wikidata properties: instance of, start/end time, country, participants, collection items at, archives at; extensible with funder, field of work, itinerary etc.
  • Links to holding collections can reference specimen PIDs; archival material (logbooks, field books, correspondence) and finding aids are recorded.
  • Scholia knowledge graph of the Harriman Alaska Expedition shows participants, publications and collections.
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Programme abstract

Here, There, and Everywhere: Modelling Research Expeditions in Wikidata

Sabine von Mering

Research expeditions are major sources of natural history collections and connect distributed cultural heritage across institutions and countries. However, expedition data remain fragmented, inconsistently modelled, and often lack stable identifiers. This hampers discoverability, interoperability, and provenance tracking, while also limiting efforts to contextualise collecting events and practices within their broader historical context. The TDWG Task Group “Modelling Research Expeditions” developed recommendations for modelling and linking of expedition data, working towards a shared terminology, a reusable data model and schema, and best practices for publishing expedition metadata as Linked Open Data.

The presentation proposes recommendations for an expedition data model connecting both historical and contemporary collecting events with specimens and other objects, participants, institutions, localities, itineraries, publications, and archival records. Particular emphasis is placed on interoperability with Darwin Core, the use of Wikidata identifiers, and collaborative community curation of expedition metadata as a complement or even replacement for the round-tripping of data back into collection databases. The recommendations aim to improve data quality, facilitate cross-institutional linking, annotation and validation workflows, and transparency regarding the historical context of collecting activities. By enabling machine-readable and multilingual representation of expedition data, the proposed model contributes to making collection data more FAIR and supports broader reuse in e.g., knowledge graphs, visualisation tools, and digital humanities research.

Submitted to the conference programme before the talk, so the talk itself may differ.