IWAC Bibliographic Data on Wikidata
The Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC) includes over 850 bibliographical references on Islam in West Africa. To align with open science principles and the WikiCite initiative, I uploaded the metadata for these references to Wikidata, the free knowledge base that acts as central storage for structured data across Wikimedia projects.
By integrating IWAC's bibliographic data into Wikidata's linked data environment, the references become more discoverable, interoperable, and reusable by the global research community. Researchers can run complex SPARQL queries to explore relationships between works, authors, topics, and institutions—connections that would be difficult to surface in a traditional bibliography.
Visualizations with Scholia
A key benefit of this integration is the ability to generate automatic visualizations through Scholia, a service that creates scholarly profiles from Wikidata. For example, the topic page for Islam in Burkina Faso displays:
- Publications per year — a timeline of scholarly output on the topic
- Authors publishing about the topic — ranked list of researchers with publication counts
- Author score — bubble chart showing researchers weighted by publications and citations
- Co-author graph — network visualization of collaborative relationships
- Co-occurring topics — graph and map showing thematic connections
- Citation analysis — works and authors most frequently cited
- Institutional map — geographic distribution of affiliated organizations
These visualizations update automatically as new data is added to Wikidata.