Open data sources about people

At a glance

Wikidata

Wikidata is a collaboratively edited knowledge base of items and statements. A person is an item that is an instance of human (Q5), with statements such as occupation (P106), employer (P108), position held (P39) and educated at (P69), each optionally qualified with dates and backed by references. External-identifier properties link the item to ORCID (P496), ISNI (P213), VIAF (P214) and many other registries. All structured data in Wikidata is released under CC0, so it can be reused without attribution, although citing the source is good practice.

# People with an ORCID iD who work for a given employer (Wikidata Query Service)
SELECT ?person ?personLabel ?orcid WHERE {
  ?person wdt:P31 wd:Q5 ;          # instance of: human
          wdt:P108 wd:Q00000000 ;  # employer (placeholder item)
          wdt:P496 ?orcid .        # ORCID iD
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
}
LIMIT 50

DBpedia

DBpedia extracts structured data from Wikipedia articles, chiefly their infoboxes, and publishes it as linked data with its own ontology and one resource per article (https://dbpedia.org/resource/...). Because it is derived from Wikipedia text, it follows Wikipedia's licensing: CC BY-SA 3.0 and the GNU Free Documentation License, which means attribution and share-alike apply to reuse. Its coverage of people mirrors Wikipedia's.

OpenAlex

OpenAlex is an open catalog of the research system: works, authors, institutions, sources, topics and funders. It was launched in January 2022 by OurResearch, starting from the final snapshot of Microsoft Academic Graph, which was retired at the end of 2021. Authors have OpenAlex IDs (A followed by digits), affiliations and, where known, ORCID iDs. Author records are produced by automatic disambiguation, so they are sometimes split or merged and their IDs can change. The data is CC0.

curl "https://api.openalex.org/authors?search=lena%20marlowe&per-page=5"

ORCID public data

An ORCID record belongs to the researcher, who decides what is public: name, other names, biography, employments, education, works and linked identifiers. The public parts can be read through ORCID's public API, and ORCID releases a public data file at least once a year, under CC0, containing the public information of every record. Because the person maintains the record, it is self-asserted; employments and works added by an institution or publisher through ORCID's member API carry that source.

curl -H "Accept: application/json" "https://pub.orcid.org/v3.0/0000-0002-1825-0097/record"

Using open data about people responsibly

• A license covers copyright, not data protection. CC0 lets you reuse a dataset; data protection law such as the GDPR still applies to personal data about living people.
• Keep the source. Record where each fact came from and when it was retrieved, so it can be checked and corrected.
• Take only what is needed. Some properties reveal sensitive information (religion, political affiliation, health). Leave them out.
• Re-read rather than archive. People and editors correct records; a copy kept for years drifts from the truth.

How SelfBadge uses open data

Some SelfBadge profiles start from public Wikidata information about people publicly known for their work. The seeder reads names, occupations, positions, education, awards, the official website and selected identifiers; it never reads properties such as religion, political party, ethnic group or health. Every seeded fact keeps its source and retrieval date, is shown as seeded rather than verified, and the profile stays out of search engines until the person claims it. SeeProfiles from public sources.