Open Data - Wikidata and OpenStreetMap
26 August 2025
18 attendees
Description
Let’s chat about open data with presentations on both Wikidata and OpenStreetMap!
Speakers and topics
Wikidata - its place in the Open Data eco-system
Ian Watt, Co-founder and trustee at Code The City
Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, are able to use under the CC0 public domain license. As of early-2025, Wikidata had 1.65 billion item statements (semantic triples). Its open nature means that anyone can contribute data to it, and its powerful SPARQL interface permits sophisticated querying.
In this talk, Ian will give an overview of Wikidata, examine use cases for it, identify some associated tools, and finish with practical SPARQL querying examples to help you get started in re-using data from the system.
OpenStreetMap: what, why, and how's it doing?
Gregory Marler, Developer and consultant. Passionate about data and openness.
A world wide wiki map, the leading open geospatial database, an unstoppable community project, a life-saver for humanitarian projects, a source of art, a global industry disruptor, and much more. You might know OpenStreetMap, but how well do you really know it?
Let’s also look at why you should care about it, why you should use it, and why millions of people have built the data. Not to mention how good and strong the project and the data is now. This will be a wide-breadth talk covering the many subject interests of OpenStreetMap. No technical knowledge required, but there will be pointers to where you can find out more.
Speaker bios
Ian Watt
Ian is an active champion of Open Data, having led Aberdeen City Council to be the first Scottish Local Authority to publish any open data. Ian won two national UK awards in 2013: SOCITM Member of the year and the UK Local Government Category of 2013’s Digital Leaders 50. Ian was one of the author’s of Scottish Government’s Open Data Strategy 2015. Ian, an active trainer for Wikimedia UK, was shortlisted in their awards in 2019 and 2020. He was shortlisted in the Open UK awards 2021. Ian was a non-exec director of Democracy Club from Nov 2017 to Sept 2022. He has written extensively about open data, including a paper, as lead author, for the David Hume Institute. He co-founded Code The City in 2014 and has run their Data Meet-ups, Python User Group sessions, and hack weekends. He initiated Scottish Open Unconference and was part of the group who developed Open Data Scotland.
Gregory Marler
A lover of data and a big OpenStreetMap advocate. Gregory literally put places on the map when it was still blank, and last year moved home to Dundee where his free-time activities continue to involve surveying the world around him.
Slides
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