GLAM-WIKI 2015/Proposals/Wikidata, a target for Europeana’s semantic strategy?

This is an accepted submission for GLAM-WIKI 2015.

Submission no. GW15.1031

Title of the submission

Wikidata, a target for Europeana’s semantic strategy?

Type of submission

presentation

Author of the submission

Valentine Charles(1), Hugo Manguinhas(1), Vladimir Alexiev(2), Maarten Dammers

Country of origin

Netherlands(1), Bulgaria(2)

Affiliation

Europeana Foundation(1), Ontotext(2)

E-mail address

valentine.charleseuropeana.eu; hugo.manguinhaseuropeana.eu; vladimir.alexievontotext.com; maartenmdammers.nl

Username

Personal homepage or blog

Twitter username

valentinec89

Facebook url

Abstract

For Europeana, the platform for Europe’s digital cultural heritage from libraries, museums and archives, getting richer (semantic and multilingual) metadata is a priority. It improves access to the 40 million cultural heritage objects, notably enabling the multilingual retrieval of documents and creates relations between objects. To enhance data and enable retrieval across languages, Europeana performs automatic enrichment by selecting source metadata field(s) in the Europeana data and creating links to a selected target vocabulary or dataset representing contextual resources such as places, concepts, agents and time periods. Wikidata is since a while on Europeana’s radar as a potential new target for enrichment but how can it be integrated with cultural heritage data?

Detailed proposal

For Europeana, the platform for Europe’s digital cultural heritage from libraries, museums and archives, getting richer (semantic and multilingual) metadata is a priority. It improves access to the 40 million cultural heritage objects, notably enabling the multilingual retrieval of documents and creates relations between objects. To enhance data and enable retrieval across languages, Europeana performs automatic enrichment. This process consists in selecting source metadata field(s) in the Europeana data and in creating links to a selected target vocabulary or dataset representing contextual resources such as places, concepts, agents and time periods.

Europeana presently relies on cultural heritage open vocabularies such as AAT, GND, Iconclass and VIAF but also more generic vocabularies such as DBpedia or more recently with Freebase. Wikidata is since a while on Europeana’s radar as a potential new target for enrichment but how can it be integrated with cultural heritage data?

In its semantic strategy, Europeana defines the following requirements for selecting target vocabularies or datasets. A target should be:

• technically available (through Linked Data or in dedicated repositories);

• properly documented;

• open access;

• well-connected to other vocabularies, e.g. equivalent elements in other vocabularies are indicated; or already re-use existing vocabularies, in order to avoid duplication and redundancy

• multilingual.

A recent analysis on Wikidata conducted as part of the Europeana affiliated project Europeana Creative confirmed our assumptions that Wikidata should be Europeana’s next target for enrichment. The analysis highlights for instance the coverage of Wikidata in terms of persons/ organisations: Some 22k literary characters have been recorded: 11993 fictional characters, 6963 fictional human, 2589 mythical characters, 357 group of fictional characters, 159 fictional organization. 13k GLAM orgs among which 438 art gallery, 83 art gallery; 882 library, 199 national library, 114 public library, 60 library, 28 Carnegie libraries… The coverage of Wikidata is also very good in terms of languages: Wikidata has a lot of translations, and names are always tagged with a language tag. For instance for Cranach, it provides names with 57 unique languages tags, representing 44 languages and 13 language variants.

In addition to its broad coverage in terms of entities, Wikidata links to various sources that would be very relevant to contextualise Europeana objects. It includes linkage of different Wikipedias, Wikimedia Commons and other Wikimedia sites but also to controlled authorities such as GND or VIAF . The analysis has identified 504,736 Wikidata items with VIAF ids and 567,240 items with VIAF or GND ids. Linking Europeana objects with Wikidata items would provide Europeana with additional links and richer information.

Projects such as Sum of all paintings demonstrates already the potential of Wikidata for Europeana. In this project each Wikidata painting has been linked to the corresponding painting in Europeana by the means of a new Wikidata property.

This presentation will provide detail about the Europeana enrichment strategy and will show how Wikidata fits in its strategy and more broadly how it can be relevant to the GLAMs sector.

Track

• Discovery

Length of presentation/talk

25 Minutes

Target audience

For GLAMs interested in re-using Wikidata, for Wikidata adepts willing to help GLAMs. Intermediate level.

Expected outcomes

GLAMs will get a better idea of the potential of Wikidata and examples of how integrate it in their own infrastructure.

Will you attend GLAM-WIKI 2015 if your submission is not accepted?

yes

Slides or further information (optional)

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Interested attendees

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1. charlesv.
2. Jheald (overleg) 27 feb 2015 15:19 (CET)
3. Susannaanas (overleg) 28 feb 2015 21:38 (CET)
4. 85jesse (overleg) 2 mrt 2015 07:56 (CET)
5. Kippelboy (overleg) 5 mrt 2015 05:37 (CET)
6. Touzrimounir (overleg) 7 mrt 2015 20:18 (CET)
7. ESM (overleg) 8 mrt 2015 19:39 (CET)
8. Ziko (overleg) 18 mrt 2015 13:22 (CET)
9. Vladimir Alexiev (overleg)
10. SandraF (WMNL) (overleg) 2 apr 2015 21:48 (CEST)
11. your name here