AI-BRIDGES Open Forum: April meeting

19th April 2026

AI-BRIDGES Open Forum: April meeting

Hosting Helen Williams & Prof. Christof Schöch

This coming Friday, April 24th, we’ll be meeting at 15:00 UK time for our monthly AI-BRIDGES Open Forum meeting. Link to calendar invite here.

We will be hosting two presenters:

* Helen Williams, Metadata Manager, Library, London School of Economics and Political Science. Helen will present on “LSE’s Adventures in Wikidata-land: tears and triumphs down the rabbit hole”.

* Prof. Christof Schöch, Professor for Digital Humanities, FB II, Co-Director, Trier Center for Digital Humanities. Christof will present on: “LOD+LLMs: Bridging Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Graphs at the Trier Center for Digital Humanities”.

Below are the full blurbs and bios.

he last portion of the coming meeting will be dedicated to the AI-BRIDGES pipeline / workflow for how institutions can easily donate data. We are building on work done by Wikimedia Brasil, that designed the framework presented. You are all invited to read through the framework and edit / comment with one main question in mind — does the framework still hold today, or is there anything we need to add / remove / change in it?

This is a collaborative effort, so please share your experiences and help shape how the AI-BRIDGES pipeline / workflow looks like. Our discussion will focus on whether there are things to change in that framework before delving into more details with each section of the framework in the coming meetings.

See you all Friday,

Shani.

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Recording of April meeting

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speakers details

1) Helen’s Blurb & bio
In 2019 the power of Wikidata to create links and reveal relationships between entities sparked an exploration of its potential to increase the discoverability and accessibility of library metadata. With no prior experience or knowledge of Wikidata, what followed was a steep learning curve. Since then, LSE Library has established WikiProjects for PhD theses and for a collection of oral history suffrage interviews, and Wikidata is now being piloted to share Digital Library metadata and to support research visibility work at an institutional level. This short presentation offers a fast-paced overview of that much longer journey highlighting the challenges and successes we encountered down the rabbit hole that led us to Wikidata-land!

Helen joined LSE Library in 2005, having previously worked at the Institute of Directors and the London Library. She has been in her current role as Metadata Manager since 2014, and has responsibility for Library collections and research outputs metadata, with a strategic focus on exploring and developing new ways in which metadata can support research, learning and teaching. In 2025 she appointed a Wikimedian in Residence to her Metadata team with a two-year focus on research visibility.
She has been involved in metadata initiatives at a national and international level, including as a committee member of MDG from 2009-2016, as part of the Metadata 2020 collaboration, and as a current member of OCLC’s Metadata Managers Planning Group. She has recently participated in OCLC working groups on AI in metadata workflows and a UKI focus group on Reimagining Descriptive Workflows. She has authored and co-authored a number of metadata articles and conference papers and regularly collaborates with metadata practitioners in the UK and beyond.
LinkedIn; helskrw.bsky.social; 0000-0003-1259-7097; LSE profile

2) Christof’s Blurb:
The aim of this talk is to present the ways in which the Trier Center for Digital Humanities, a research center founded at Trier University in Germany in 1998, is combining the use of Linked Open Data and Large Language Models in our investigations of literary and cultural heritage. Several use cases illustrating this approach, its benefits and its challenges will be discussed, ranging from French Literature to historical wine labels and scholarly publications.
For background, you can check here: https://christof-schoech.de/en.html

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AI meeting summary:

The April AI Bridges Open Forum meeting focused on hearing experiences from two presenters about working with Wikidata and Wikibase in academic and library settings.

Helen Williams from LSE shared her challenges implementing Wikidata projects, including data protection concerns, technical difficulties with data upload processes, and the lack of concrete impact metrics to justify the work.
Prof. Christof Schöch from Trier University presented three digital humanities projects that combined linked open data with machine learning, demonstrating the potential for federated queries between Wikibase and Wikidata instances.
The discussion highlighted ongoing challenges including the complexity of data upload processes, difficulties with federation between systems, and the need for better tools and documentation. Shani then reminded people of the process for designing a workflow for institutions’ data sharing, based on Wikimedia Brasil’s work. The work on that will resume after the Symposium, and Shani will share updates on that in the June meeting.