Linking OSM and Wikidata for World Heritage, Man and the Biosphere and

Hi all

I work at UNESCO as their Wikimedian in Residence, I’m currently importing data about UNESCO inscriptions (e.g World Heritage Sites) to Wikidata through Mix n’ Match. I would very much like to create a link between Wikidata and OpenStreetMap for each of the physical place inscription programmes (World Heritage, Man and the Biosphere and Global Geoparks). Here is a plan of how I think this could be done, I would very much like some feedback on the possible approach and if anyone would be interested in joining in please let me know.

  1. Import all World Heritage, Man and the Biosphere and Global Geoparks items into Wikidata, currently only the World Heritage Sites are complete but the other sites are being imported soon.
  2. Create a page to organise the importing, we can create a section on https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiProject_UNESCO
  3. Create lists for showing which of the sites for each programme do not have the link to OSM. For instance here are all the World Heritage sites with no OpenStreetMap Relation identifier This will act as a work list to know what work has and hasn’t been done. https://tools.wmflabs.org/autolist/index.php?language=en&project=wikipedia&category=&depth=12&wdq=claim%5B1435%3A9259%5D%20and%20noclaim%5B402%5D&pagepile=&statementlist=&run=Run&mode_manual=or&mode_cat=or&mode_wdq=or&mode_find=or&chunk_size=10000
  4. Propose identifiers on OSM for Man and the Biosphere sites and Global Geoparks in the same vein as World Heritage Sites https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:heritage
  5. Find all the existing OSM objects for the sites and add the identifier and link them to Wikidata.
  6. Create any new objects that don’t currently exist on OSM, add the identifiers and add the indentifiers to Wikidata.

I hope that we could involve people from both the Wikidata and OSM communities (I assume there is some overlap anyway) and encourage more people interested in Wikidata to learn about and contribute to OSM and vice versa.

I’ve also posted this message on the Wikidata forum here https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat#Linking_OSM_and_Wikidata_for_World Heritage,_Man_and_the_Biosphere_and_Global_Geoparks_items

Thanks

John

Can you say something about the license of the UNESCO data? http://whc.unesco.org/en/syndication seems to indicate all of this data is proprietary and can’t be used in an open project.

Sure, so the datasets as a whole is still under that license however the individual sites will all have Wikidata items soon, if a change in license happens in the future then the additional data will be added to Wikidata.

All the World Heritage sites already have Wikidata items so starting there might be a good place to start.