ORCID institutions now partly aligned with Wikidata - get involved!

[Antonin Delpeuch (lists)]

Hi all,

In its API, ORCID exposes the institutions added by users in the
Education, Employment and Funding sections of their profiles.

These institutions come with basic metadata (city, region, country), and
often identifiers, either from FundRef
(http://search.crossref.org/funding) or from Ringgold (search not
publicly available).

Ringgold identifiers are very opaque as the Ringgold database is
restricted to subscribers. I could not find any other API where they
were exposed. In theory, these opaque identifiers could still be useful
to determine if two ORCID profiles are referring to the same
institution, but even this use is compromised by a technical issue [1].

Together with Andy Mabbett, Wikipedian in residence at ORCID, we have
started to align Ringgold identifiers with Wikidata [2], a free
knowledge base that everyone can edit.

As of today, 13,597 institutions have been associated with a Ringgold
identifier on Wikidata. Concretely, this means that you can resolve the
Ringgold ids discovered in the ORCID API to a Wikidata item (if the
identifier has been added for this institution).

For instance, to resolve the Ringgold id "5828", you can use the
following link:
https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/resolver.php?prop=P3500&value=5828
(P3500 is the code for the "Ringgold id" property).
Of course Wikidata comes with many other tools that allow you to access
this data programmatically.

Now, 13,597 institutions only represent a tiny fraction of the Ringgold
database (about 400,000 records). If you are interested in helping us
perform this alignment, you are very welcome to join the effort. You can
do that in various ways:

- adding manually the Ringgold identifiers you know of on Wikidata. You
need first to find the item that corresponds to the target institution,
using the search function, then adding a statement on the item, using
the "Ringgold identifier" property. You can also create the item if it
does not exist yet. No sign up required.

- getting involved in the semi-automatic alignment of existing datasets
of institutions, using various tools (Mix'n'Match [4], OpenRefine [5], ...).

The existing Ringgold identifiers were added mostly automatically, by
aligning them with ISNI ids [3]. Do not hesitate to get in touch with us
so that our efforts are coordinated.

Finally, I must note that ORCID seem to be aware of the usability issues
of closed identifiers as they have started their own "Organization
Identifier Project":
https://blog.orcid.org/blog/2016/10/31/organization-identifier-project-way-forward
This looks extremely promising!

Best regards,
Antonin Delpeuch


[1]: Apart from the fact that it is possible for users to input
institutions without identifiers (by ignoring the suggestions from the
drop-down menu), it is also possible for users to assign wrong
identifiers to institutions:
https://github.com/ORCID/ORCID-Source/issues/3297

[2]: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/

[3]: https://zenodo.org/record/268334

[4]: https://tools.wmflabs.org/mix-n-match/?mode=catalog_details&catalog=373

[5]: http://openrefine.org/ and
https://tools.wmflabs.org/openrefine-wikidata/