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Opening Up and Linking Type Catalogues in Wikidata – Increasing The Accessibility of Natural History Collections

  • Sabine von Mering

Type specimens are fundamental for taxonomy and irreplaceable components of natural history collections. Type catalogues are scholarly publications listing type material of certain taxonomic groups held in specific collections. The open, collaborative knowledge base Wikidata was used to create a multilingual dataset of published type catalogues, starting with such articles linked to the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. Wikidata items were enriched to allow filtering for specific institutions, collections, taxa, collectors or expeditions. This article aims to improve accessibility to relevant biodiversity literature and to highlight the potential of Wikidata for research and knowledge contextualisation by providing a dynamically growing dataset that can be reused as AI training data.

  • Keywords:
  • catalogue of type specimens,
  • Linked Open Data,
  • scholarly publications,
  • type specimen,
  • Wikidata,
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Sabine von Mering

Natural History Museum of Berlin, Germany - ORCID: 0000-0003-2982-7792

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  • Publication Year: 2026
  • Pages: 195-209
  • Content License: CC BY 4.0
  • © 2026 Author(s)

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  • Publication Year: 2026
  • Content License: CC BY 4.0
  • © 2026 Author(s)

Chapter Information

Chapter Title

Opening Up and Linking Type Catalogues in Wikidata – Increasing The Accessibility of Natural History Collections

Authors

Sabine von Mering

Language

English

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-1010-2.25

Peer Reviewed

Publication Year

2026

Copyright Information

© 2026 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Bibliographic Information

Book Title

Wikidata e la ricerca. Condividere esperienze / Wikidata and Research. Sharing Experiences

Book Subtitle

Atti del Convegno, Firenze, 5-6 giugno 2025 / Conference proceedings, Florence, 5-6 June 2025

Editors

Elena Marangoni, Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo

Peer Reviewed

Number of Pages

378

Publication Year

2026

Copyright Information

© 2026 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Publisher Name

Firenze University Press

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-1010-2

ISBN Print

979-12-215-1009-6

eISBN (pdf)

979-12-215-1010-2

Series Title

Studi e saggi

Series ISSN

2704-6478

Series E-ISSN

2704-5919

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