Wikidata: the potential of structured data to enable applications such as Histropedia

Despite the vast number of uses for Wikipedia, you still can’t ask it even simple questions like “who is the Mayor of London?” – Computers simply do not understand the unstructured data. Wikidata is a ground-breaking new Wikimedia project that aims to tackle this problem and many others, by making the sum of all human knowledge machine-readable. It will provide a
back end to Wikipedia, potentially allowing a single change in Wikidata to correct and improve information represented in multiple places in Wikipedia, across all language versions.
In this presentation I will give a basic overview of how Wikidata works, including information about how the data is structured and connected to other resources on the internet, as well as the methods being used to collect and organize the data. I will also highlight the major similarities and differences between Wikidata and the already widely used DBpedia.
Finally, I will go on to explain the implications of Wikidata’s development for the future of Wikipedia and the rest of the web, giving examples of applications that have already been built upon data from Wikidata such as Histropedia, which aims to visualize the sum of all knowledge using interactive timelines.