IndExs as a pilot to interlink relational databases and graph databases

The presentation describes the current approach to interlink the openly available data of the „IndExs – Index of Exsiccatae“ database for integration in Wikidata, a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. IndExs is an important reference resource for the herbarium community providing FAIR data on botanical and mycological published serials of specimens called exsiccatae. The management is done in two underlying relational data bases of the Diversity Workbench framework. The presented pilot will make the data accessible via a new webinterface and API. There are a number of technical issues for this project including the processing and the interlinking of various types of PIDs used in the relational (SQL) and the graph systems (RDF). Other challenges are more conceptual and comprize the disambiguation of persons (editors), their identity and relationship to other persons, the structured description of single exsiccata and exsiccata-like works and their relation to superseding and preceding series.

The talk was given at the annual Meeting of the CETAF Information Science & Technology Commission (ISTC), April 29th to 30th, 2024 in Prague.