Scholia Chemistry: access to chemistry in Wikidata

Egon Willighagen, Denise Slenter, Adriano Rutz, Daniel Mietchen, Finn Årup Nielsen

Sharing knowledge on chemicals in the digital age has been the playground of databases such as the Chemical Abstract Services and PubChem. Wikipedia complements this field by providing context to chemicals aimed at a broad audience, but is not easily read by machines. Wikidata was started as a database service to improve the machine readability of the knowledge captured in Wikipedia. Wikidata has an open license, application programming interfaces, and a strong provenance model. Scholia uses the features to provide access to chemical knowledge. This study reviews the chemistry in Wikidata, shows how thousands of new chemicals were added, extends Wikidata with new properties for chemical representation and external links to additional databases, and shows how we extended Scholia to represent the chemistry in Wikidata.