Here, There, and Everywhere: Modelling Research Expeditions in Wikidata

What this was about

Sabine von Mering presented on behalf of the TDWG Research Expeditions task group (Collection Descriptions Interest Group). Expedition data are fragmented across institutions and lack persistent identifiers, hindering provenance and historical, including colonial, contextualisation. The group has a draft definition of a research expedition, promotes Wikidata QIDs as identifiers for expedition parent events, and proposes a lightweight, extensible Wikidata schema with minimum properties, links to holding collections and archives, and knowledge-graph visualisation (e.g. Scholia for the Harriman Alaska Expedition). Recommendations: create or enrich expedition items, use minimum properties, and record QIDs in collection management systems.

Why it matters. Improves discoverability and provenance of expedition-derived collections and supports historical and colonial-context research.

In the room

• Expeditions were often transdisciplinary, so specimens, ethnographic objects and archives are scattered across institutions.
• The terms research/scientific expedition are not unproblematic given colonial, economic and military entanglements.
• Working definition: an organised, time-bounded field activity by one or more people at one or more locations, affiliated with an institution, for research purposes, distinct from routine collecting (still a draft).
• In GBIF an expedition can be an event, linked via parentEventID; some datasets already use Wikidata QIDs; longer-term explicit Darwin Core support is being considered alongside DwC-DP.
• Minimum recommended Wikidata properties: instance of, start/end time, country, participants, collection items at, archives at; extensible with funder, field of work, itinerary etc.
• Links to holding collections can reference specimen PIDs; archival material (logbooks, field books, correspondence) and finding aids are recorded.
• Scholia knowledge graph of the Harriman Alaska Expedition shows participants, publications and collections.

Notable moments