Connecting the sum of all human knowledge, one edit at a time

VIDEO OF THE TALK: http://slideshot.epfl.ch/play/kiTi5z41VStY

Over the past few years, Wikidata – Wikipedia sister’s project and the free knowledge base that anyone can edit – has been adopted by a growing number of communities of practice and scientific groups as their infrastructure of choice. In this talk, I will show how expert communities, volunteers and algorithms are collaborating to build a structured repository of all knowledge. I’ll discuss in particular current efforts to create a shared vocabulary to map concepts across disciplines and a central repository of sources to represent the provenance of facts. I’ll discuss challenges and opportunities open knowledge bases can offer to accelerate scientific discovery and make research more accessible and reproducible.

Dario Taraborelli is a social computing researcher and open knowledge advocate based in San Francisco. He is currently the Head of Research at the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia and its sister projects. His research spans the behavioural and social aspects of online collaboration and commons-based peer production. As a co-author of the Altmetrics Manifesto, a founder of the Initiative for Open Citations, and a long-standing open access advocate, he is interested in the design of open systems to promote, track and measure the discoverability and reuse of research objects.

Prior to joining the Wikimedia Foundation, he held research and teaching positions at University College London, University of Surrey, Sciences Po, Paris Diderot University, and the Jean-Nicod Institute. He holds a PhD and MSc in Cognitive Science from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, a MA in Philosophy of Science from the University of Pisa, and a licenza from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.