March 19, 2026 Advisory Committee

[Martin]

Attendees

• Julie Faure Lacroix - Advisory Committee
• Martin Magdinier - Project Manager

Discussion

We discussed

• the application to the Funding opportunity: Sovereign Tech Fellowship application (community coordination and governance)
• the organization of the 2026 Community calls: presenting format and initial plan
• 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:
  • Problems with VIAF Reconciliation
  • Add columns from reconciled values not working via Wikidata
  • New Reconciliation Service (The Movie Database - TMDB)

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| Martin
March 19 |

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• 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:
• • Problems with VIAF Reconciliation
  • Add columns from reconciled values not working via Wikidata

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?

Tom