Aberdeen Data Meetup 07 October 2025

"Make your data project sparkle with Wikidata!" - Ian Watt

Wikidata is the world’s largest open knowledge graph, bringing together facts about people, places, culture, and science in a way that anyone can query and reuse. Maintained by a global community and freely available under the public domain dedication (CC0), it has become an essential backbone for open data projects, research, and digital innovation.

In this interactive session you’ll discover what Wikidata is, why its unique licensing model makes it so powerful, and how to unlock its potential using SPARQL - the query language for linked data. After a short introduction, we’ll roll up our sleeves for a code-along where you’ll write your own queries to explore topics such as creating a timeline of Scottish Writers to plotting Scottish football stadiums on a map.

Whether you’re a data enthusiast, developer, researcher, or simply curious, this hands-on workshop will give you the tools and inspiration to connect your own projects to the vast universe of Wikidata. And if you are a Python coder we will look at how to use that to programmatically retrieve data from WD - and more that you can explore.

Speaker Bio

Ian Watt is a co-founder and Trustee of the charity Code The City (SC053447), and a long-standing advocate for open knowledge and open data. In 2010, while at Aberdeen City Council, he led the authority to become the first public body in Scotland to publish open data. He went on to co-author the Scottish Government’s Open Data Strategy (2015) and later established the annual Scottish Open Data Unconference in 2020.

Ian’s contributions have been widely recognised. He won two national awards in 2013: SOCITM Member of the Year, and the Digital Leaders 50 UK Local Government Award, and has since been shortlisted for honours from Wikimedia UK (2019, 2020) and the Open UK Awards (2021). In 2023, he was made a Burgess of Guild of the City and Royal Burgh of Aberdeen, and in 2025 he received the Order of the Scottish Samurai.

Alongside his governance roles, including five years as a non-executive director of Democracy Club, Ian is an active trainer for Wikimedia UK and runs multiple Aberdeen-based meetups, including a monthly Wiki Meetup. He has written extensively about open data, including a paper for the David Hume Institute, and gained an MSc in Data Science following his retirement from the public sector. He is also a Fellow of the RSA and of the Institute of Leadership.

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This event is organised by a charity - Code The City.

CTC suggests a small donation to help with charity admin costs, but if this is a barrier please just change the ticket price to what you can afford. If that is still a barrier, just ask for a free ticket.

We are now established in our new premises, which is still a work in progress. That means that our disability access is not what we want it to be. If you are uncomfortable with, or unable to use stairs, please book an online ticket for the Zoom session. We are working to improve this but it will take a few months.

If you select a physical ticket and it happens that we cannot meet physically you will have to attend the Zoom session.

Those attending the physical space meetup should attend at 6pm for pizza and drinks. The talk will be from 6.30pm. Doors will be locked from 6.30pm.

**If tickets are sold out please do not attend as you will be refused entry without a ticket. **

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