The conversation focused on how to host and maintain reconciliation services used by the OpenRefine community. We also discussed how the Advisory Committee could better support these services, connecting them to ongoing related discussions:
The conversation focused on how to host and maintain reconciliation services used by the OpenRefine community. We also discussed how the Advisory Committee could better support these services, connecting them to ongoing related discussions:
Is there any more detail available on this discussion? Is the committee thinking about hosting reconciliation services itself?
The VIAF and Wikidata issues seem quite different to me. The VIAF reconciliation service is nominally maintained, but occasionally suffers from perturbations in the underlying VIAF service itself. I don't know how committed OCLC is to maintaining VIAF as an open API for public use, but it's not something that anyone outside of its membership really has any control over.
The Wikidata reconciliation service is something which is core to a large part of the OpenRefine community and greatly benefits Wikidata by making it easier to contribute high quality data, but it doesn't appear to be something that the Wikidata team values enough to support themselves. Right now it seems like the service is basically on autopilot which means there's no one to fix problems caused by Wikidata tightening their API requirements. While it would certainly be possible for the OpenRefine team to pick up maintenance, we've already got too few bodies for too much work.
Metaweb and Google understood the value of tooling and an ecosystem to support the ingestion of high quality data into Freebase. Who can help the Wikidata team understand this value proposition?
We were only two in this call, so it was more of an exploratory discussion with @jfaurel than a formal decision.
Following #7731 and T419770, I think it is worth opening a broader conversation on how we maintain the wikidata reconciliation service. I will create a dedicated thread so it is not mixed up with Advisory Committee minutes.
Here is where things stand. I didn't create a separate thread because Antonin's historical analysis in this comment summarizes the situation well.
I created this document to coordinate the current rate-limit issue with wikidata and discuss long-term maintenance and ownership of the reconciliation service.
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