June recording + meeting in September

[Shani Evenstein Sigalov]

Hello everyone, 

Thanks to everyone who was able to join us for the June meeting, especially our presenters, Jason Evans, Open Data Manager and AI lead, at the National Library of Wales; and Adrián Cuadrón Cortés, a researcher working at the HiTZ Center (University of the Basque Country) on the ECHOLOT project. 

Recording of the meeting is available here, presentations attached, and an AI summary is below. This time it includes important links, like the one for the Wikibase MCP that was launched at the AI-BRIDGES Symposium (thanks, Philippe Saade!), and some relevant links for Wikimania. 

Next meeting:
* No meeting in July: as many of us will be at Wikimania 2026 in Paris, we will not have an Open Forum meeting in July. We will host a panel related to the AI-BRIDGES project at Wikimania, which will be recorded and shared, as well as other related meetings.
* No meeting in August: as many are traveling and taking some time off. 

* Next meeting will be in September 25th: We will be hosting Dr. Lozanna Rossenova, David Lindemann & Kunika Kono. More details and a reminder will follow a week before, but feel free to add that to your calendar via this link. 

Stay cool and have a lovely summer, 

Shani.

[Shani Evenstein Sigalov]

AI short summary: 

The AI Bridges Open Forum Monthly Meeting featured presentations from Jason Evans and Adrián Cuadron about their work with linked data and entity recognition for cultural heritage institutions.

AI and Linked Data Projects

Jason presented the National Library of Wales's work on linked data and AI, focusing on entity recognition and reconciliation using tools like OpenRefine and Wikibase. He discussed challenges with OCR quality for historical content, particularly in Welsh, and the need for context-aware entity recognition. Adrián shared his work on the Echolod project, which aims to use AI for named entity recognition and entity linking for cultural heritage data, specifically developing a pipeline using LACHA, a Basque language model, to process PDF documents and link entities to Wikidata.

AI Collaboration and Data Reconciliation

Shani shared additional context on ECHOLOT, the project connected to Adrian's work, emphasizing the potential collaboration with AI-BRIDGES to avoid duplicating efforts. Jason asked about challenges in AI reconciliation, to which Adrian responded that errors often stem from incorrect database links or Wikidata IDs, and highlighted the importance of defining prompts accurately for the model. David provided additional background on the ECHOLOT project, explaining its goal to enable GLAM institutions to upload and enrich data for the Wikimedia ecosystem and European aggregators, while noting challenges in entity linking, particularly with name variants and scoring thresholds.

Wikidata Embeddings and Pipeline Updates

David reported positive results using Wikidata embeddings for intelligent open refine, though the current implementation is limited to entities with Wikipedia articles. Adrián noted challenges with entity duplication in Wikidata that could affect evaluation accuracy. Shani announced that the AI Bridges pipeline development work is being paused over the summer to avoid duplication of efforts with ECHOLOT, with plans to resume in September using a new feedback tool for collaborative design input. The AI-BRIDGES team is also developing a Synthetic Reasoning Corpus and will report more closer to the end of the year.

Wikibase Large Language Model Integration

Philippe shared a new MCP for connecting LLMs to Wikibase data, which was recently relaunched at the AI-BRIDGES Symposium. For questions on that, please write: embe...@wikimedia.de.

Shani updated the group on the Symposium recordings and mentioned a mini-strategic meeting held with about 40 Wikimedians and adjacent organizations.

AI Events at Wiki AI Fringe

Sam and Shani discussed upcoming AI-related events at Wiki AI Fringe and Wikimania. Sam explained that there will be a pre-conference day on Tuesday with various tool builders and workshops, followed by a fringe festival with hacking sessions, unconference sessions, and demonstrations from Wednesday through Friday. Shani mentioned that there is a full program of AI-related activities at the main Wikimania venue, including a panel on AI-BRIDGES and a State of Wiki & AI session with Jimmy. Sam also shared information about the Public AI Network's annual seminar series, which focuses on the practicalities of hosting public AI services (register here if interested: https://publicai.network/seminar.html). Contact Sam for more details on the fringe events.

The next open meeting will take place in September due to Wikimania & summer vacation, with exciting discussions planned for the rest of the year.

[Shani Evenstein Sigalov]

Presentations attached. 

Shani. 

[PS - apologies for spliting the message. The group did not allow it to be sent otherwise!]

[Shani Evenstein Sigalov]