Grants:Project/ContentMine/WikiFactMine/Profile
This project is funded by a Project Grant
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I believe that all public scientific knowledge should be available to everyone on the planet, as easily as possible. Also that we should use machines to help us understand and manage the complexity of knowledge. For many years I have help to create Open resources, both in science and more generally. Most recently I was funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation to create tools and community to extract facts from the scientific literature and make them available in simple accurate form for everyone to use. We have founded the non-profit organization contentmine.org to seek funding for this and run projects, such as this one.
Science is for everyone. We have a high-school student, Lars Willighagen, who is building tools to extract data about conifers and create a novel resource of open knowledge. Sometimes scientific language is off-putting but machines can help interpret this. By accumulating knowledge, and linking it we add new insights. An example is "cross-kingdom" science where we find organisms of different types in the same paper - how do insects and plants interact? or fungi and invasive species? Organized knowledge is the key resource, and the key tool to organize it is Wikidata. By adding Wikidata to scientific articles we will transform the way science is used and reported.
I've been a Wikimedian for ca 12 years - and contributed pages on chemistry and Open Data. Unlike many academics I have believed in the transformative value of Wikipedia from the start. I'm now extolling the value of Wikidata in the same way.
Everyone can be part of this project - and the more that are, the more successful it will be. And success is measured by you - if you find Wikidata-enhanced science valuable, then the project has been successful.
I'm one of ContentMine's developers and at least in the first instance I will be doing some of the development work for this grant. I have some experience of development work related to Wikimedia things: I was one of the initial users/developers/maintainers of LibraryBase [1]. You might have seen me on IRC/Gerrit/Phabricator as Tarrow. Any of these places is a great way to get in touch about development work along with the Github repositories (ContentMine Github Org). I've attended WikiCite 2016 and the "EU" Wikimedia hackathons in Jerusalem and Lyon, as well as Wikimania 2014 in London where we may have met in person.
I wish I could help you as a volunteer (working in Cambridge, UK) but I'm afraid, I don't live UK. I'm from Africa. Waiting forward to seeing the project going forward