Talk at the conference "Transfer of Ideas in European Intellectual History: From Medieval Manuscripts to Interactive Online Content" at University of Innsbruck

1. Historical Knowledge Bases
with Semantic MediaWiki
Bernhard Krabina

2. Introduction
Managing partner at KM-A Knowledge
Management Associates
Active member of the Semantic MediaWiki
community ~ 20 years, board member of
MediaWiki Stakeholder’s Group
Knowledge graph/ wiki researcher at WU
Vienna
Knowledge Management lecturer at
university of applied sciences 2
2
• KM consulting
• KM training
• KM research
• open-source SMW stack
• professional hosting

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Agenda
Semantic MediaWiki
Historical Knowledge: Use Cases
Summary/Outlook

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Agenda
Semantic MediaWiki
Historical Knowledge: Use Cases
Summary/Outlook

5. Knowledge Graph
▪ Term was made popular by Google
„Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings”
▪ Trivial definition: Ontology + Instances
https://blog.google/products/search/introducing-knowledge-graph-things-not/
actress woman
person birth date
???
is a
subclass of
has
has birthdate
Hedy Lamarr
Romy Schneider
Christiane Hörbiger
Paula Wessely
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Category:Actresses_from_Vienna

6. A scientific definition (Paulheim 2016)
A knowledge graph
• mainly describes real world entities
and their interrelations, organized in a
graph,
• defines possible classes and relations
of entities in a schema,
• allows for potentially interrelating
arbitrary entities,
• covers various topical domains.
in MediaWiki
• real world entities = wiki pages
• classes = categories and relations of
entities = properties,
• interrelating entities = linking
• wiki topic

7. Structures in MediaWiki
▪ Formatted text (Headings, numerations, paragraphs, quotes)
▪ Templates
▪ Pages and subpages
▪ Namespaces
▪ Categories and subcategories
▪ Category „inflation“
▪ Manually curated lists
▪ No querying of data inside MediaWiki

8. Knowledge Graphs and Wikipedia
vs. custom KG
• extract structured information from Wikipedia and make
this information available on the Web
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▪ free knowledge base that can be read and edited by
humans and machines alike… central storage for the data
that may be accessed by the client Wikipedias
▪ turns MediaWiki into a powerful and flexible knowledge
management system
▪ lets you store and query data within the wiki's pages
▪ a set of extensions for MediaWiki

9. Semantic MediaWiki or Wikibase?
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Managing_data_in_MediaWiki
Semantic MediaWiki Wikibase
flexible data model data model of Wikidata
properties can be pre-defined or declared by annotating properties need to be pre-defined
properties (and datatypes) can be changed any time properties cannot be changed!
requires extensions for form-based input comes with a fixed, built-in edit interface
SPARQL only with external triplestore
internal query language (easier than SPARQL) no built-in querying of data
Website with text alongside data Data interface only (text properties possible)
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10. Internal query language
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{{#ask:
[[Category:Practices]]
[[Country::Austria]]
|?Organisation
|?Coordinates
|format=table
}}

11. Internal query language
{{#ask:
[[Category:Practices]]
[[Country::Austria]]
|?Organisation
|?Coordinates
|format=map
}}
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12. > 70 result formats, supporting
MediaWiki templates
|format=moderntimeline
|format=calendar
|format=median
|format=D3chart
|format=gantt
|format=tagcloud
|format=json
|format=rdf
|format=bibtex
…
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13. Wikis: collaborative editing

14. Collaboration
• compare versions of a
page
• changes in text/data
are visible
• easy undo

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Agenda
Semantic MediaWiki
Historical Knowledge: Use Cases
Summary/Outlook

16. Vienna History Wiki
▪ City of Vienna
▪ https://www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at/
▪ German
▪ Editable by citizens, edits are checked by
the editorial team
▪ In operation since 2014
▪ Largest city wiki
People
Topographic
objects
Structures
Organizations
Events
Memorials
Maps
Terms
Other

17. Historical building

18. Literature: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.websem.2022.100771

19. FINA: fina.oeaw.ac.at
▪ Austrian Academy of
Sciences
▪ https://fina.oeaw.ac.at
▪ Correspondence of
scholars from 16th to
18th century (1440 –
1820)

20. FINA: Correspondence

21. FINA: Person

22. SILVER Wiki: silver.kbr.be
▪ Royal Library of
Belgium (KBR)
▪ Database of die-studies
for the Graeco-Roman
world. Estimate the
volume of ancient coin
production.
▪ Greek Overstrikes
Database: known
overstrikes for the
Greek world

23. Overstrike

24. Literature

25. Alcuin: Medieval texts
▪ texts of the medieval magistri and scholarly authors
▪ real, doubtful, unreal texts
▪ University of Regensburg
▪ German
▪ unfortunatly, not live
▪ project info: www.alcuin.de
Authors
Manuscripts
Works
People
Editions
Publications
Series
Glossary

26. REGEST: wiki.uibk.ac.at/regest/
▪ University of Innsbruck
▪ https://wiki.uibk.ac.at/regest/
▪ theological literature
translated from Greek to
Slavonic, starting from the
beginning of Slavonic literacy
in the 9th century until the
Ottoman conquest of the
Balkans in the 14th century.

27. Authors

28. Work

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Agenda
Semantic MediaWiki
Historical Knowledge: Use Cases
Summary/Outlook

30. SMW in historical/research contexts
• collaborative editing
of text
• version history
• unique identifiers
• open source, large
ecosystem
• API
• structured data
(Web database)
• form-based data entry
• internal querying
• data visualizations
• Semantic Web standards
• triplestore support

31. 1
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Join the SMW community!

32. MediaWiki Users & Developers
Conference, October 28-30, 2025
Hanover, Germany
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Users_and_Developers_Conference_Fall_2025

33. KM-A Knowledge Management Associates | Gersthofer Straße 162 | A-1180 Wien | office@km-a.net | www.km-a.net 33
▪ Knowledge Management
▪ Wiki consulting, Semantic MediaWiki
▪ Open Government, Open Data
Bernhard Krabina
+43 676 5103593
Bernhard.krabina@km-a.net
linkedin.com/in/krabina
@krabina