Slides for the GLAM Panel at WikidataCon 2019 in Berlin, 25. October 2019, on the role of Wikidata within data ecosystems extending beyond the realm of Wikimedia projects. Authors: Susanna Ånäs (Finland); Mike Dickison (New Zealand); Joachim Neubert (Germany); Beat Estermann (Switzerland).

1. GLAM Panel
The Role of Wikidata within Data Ecosystems
that Extend Beyond the Realm of
Wikimedia Projects
WikidataCon 2019, 25 October, Berlin

2. Susanna Ånäs Modelling Places in Cultural Heritage
Organisations in Finland
Mike Dickison New Zealand Wikipedian at Large
Joachim Neubert Donating Data to Wikidata: First Experiences
from the 20th Century Press Archive
Beat Estermann Linked Open Data Ecosystem for the
Performing Arts: Which Place for Wikidata?

3. Modelling places in
cultural heritage
organisations in Finland
Susanna Ånäs
Mikko Lappalainen, National Library of Finland
Wikidata Conference 2019

4. YSO places
AHAA - Finnish archives KOOKOS - Finnish museums
Wikidata National Land Survey
Finnish Names Archive
Melinda - Finnish libraries

5. PLACENAME
PLACE
SOURCE

6. YSO places
The Finnish General Ontology
Finto, the Finnish National Library
7355 places in Finnish and Swedish, 3444 in English, CC0

11. Place Names Cards
The Finnish Geospatial Platform Project
The Finnish Land Survey
800 000 map labels as linked open data in Finnish,
Swedish, and in 3 Saami languages, CC BY 4.0

15. The Finnish Names Archive
The Institute for the Languages of Finland, 2017
3 M field notes of place names in a Wikibase, mainly in
Finnish, some in Swedish, CC BY 4.0

17. Grönroosinmaa (toponym)
dialect form: krööruusimmaa
dialect form, locative : krööruusiimmaala
Descriptive text: “Linnainmaan tilaan kuuluva pelto, jolla on joskus ollut torppa. Torpan
omisti Grönroos-niminen mies. Tilalla on ollut myös veräjä, jota on yleisesti kutsuttu
nimellä krööruusivveräjä”
located in administrative unit (P131): Kokemäki (Q986409)
Related name
dialect form: krööruusivveräjä (typed according to pronunciation)
nominative / normalised form: Grönroosin veräjä
place type: wicket
location (P276): Grönroosinmaa
location (P276): Kakkulainen (new item), Linnainmaa (new item)
Map sheet ID: 114308 Map square X: 21
Map square Y: 45 Pin number: 7
Collection (municipality): Kokemäki Collector: Leila Koivula

18. Names Sampo
HELDIG, SeCo, Kotus, 2018
Aggregated research interface for several place name
sources

20. Modelling for a local
Wikibase

21. A local Wikibase could connect places and
names from different sources, provide data to
Wikidata and enable multilingual tagging for
museums, archives and broadcasting, either
directly or via Wikidata. It could serve minority
languages with little effort.

22. time
name change
area change
When does a place become a new item?
“The SAPO model” “The Wikidata model”

23. PLACENAME
PLACE
SOURCE

24. PLACENAME
PLACE
SOURCE
entity or property?
Wikidata uses properties
Land Survey has entities

25. PLACENAME
PLACE
SOURCE
entity or string?
lexeme?
Wikidata uses strings
Land Survey has entities
Wikidata has chosen
textual properties over
lexemes for names.

26. Geographical shapes
Wikibase does not come equipped with a possibility to use
spatial geometries or reasoning.
Federation
To be able to fully benefit from Wikidata and contribute to it,
ontology federation with Wikidata is needed.

27. Thank you!

28. NZ Wikipedian
at Large
Mike Dickison

30. The project
began heavily
focussed on
Wikipedia…

31. Edit For Equity
9–14 Oct 2018

32. …and Commons

33. Over 1000 original Des Helmore
illustrations released by Landcare
Research under a CC BY licence

34. But Wikidata grew and grew, as
I and the institutions realised
how important it was.

35. The Kākāpō Project
Felix
Q12345678
instance of
P31
Kākāpō
Q179959
New Zealand Department of Conservation

38. Find NZ Artists
Colin McCahon
Q5145349
has work in the collection
P6379
Archives New Zealand
Q4787285
Christchurch Art Gallery

43. Māori Subject Headings
Waka
Q1710791
subclass of
P279
canoe
Q171529
National Library of New Zealand

47. ZBW is member of the Leibniz Association
Donating data to Wikidata: First experiences
from the „20th Century Press Archives“ (PM20)
Joachim Neubert
ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, Kiel/Hamburg
WikidataCon, Berlin, 25./26.10.2019
GLAM panel

48. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ZBW-Personenarchiv_2015.jpg by Max-Michael Wannags
PM20 - largest public press archives worldwide

49. Page 3
20th Century Press Archives
25.000 thematic dossiers (c. 1908-1949) about
 General subjects and events
 Persons
 Companies
 Products
with more than 2 million pages scanned during a DFG funded project
2004-2007 and available online

50. Long term sustainability?
Specialized
application for
discovery and
access,
architecturally
outdated and
expensive to
maintain
Page 4
http://webopac.hwwa.de/pressemappe20

51. Moving PM20 to the Linked Open Data Cloud
Aims of WikiProject 20th Century Press Archives
• link all folders of the collection to Wikidata, providing access to
sources to Wikimedia projects and the general public
• add metadata from the folders (e.g., persons' birth dates) to the
linked Wikidata items
ZBW will maintain
• Storage of digitized images, accessible via DFG Viewer or, in future,
IIIF viewers
• Static „landing pages“, which will serve as reference for the
metadata integrated into Wikidata
Page 5

52. LOD-based infrastructure for the data donation
 Custom SPARQL endpoint with PM20 data
 Federated queries on that endpoint and the Wikidata Query Service
 Scripts transforming the output to QuickStatements input
 Data loading via QuickStatements, complemented with reference
statements
Blog post on ZBW Labs, with links to all query and script code:
http://zbw.eu/labs/en/blog/20th-century-press-archives-data-donation-
to-wikidata
Page 6

53. Page 7
Wikidata enrichment from PM20 metadata
includes relations between pre-existing items,
e.g., for Friedrich Krupp AG (Q679201):

54. Page 8
First part of ZBW‘s data donation:
The Persons Archive - completed
 5266 links (P4293) to all existing person dossiers from Wikidata items
of these, 1037 items have no other external identifier
 More than 6000 statements sourced in PM20 (“birth date”, e.g.)

55. The next big challenge
Page 9
„Map a historic system for the organization of
knowledge – materialized as newspaper
clippings – about the whole world to
Wikidata“

56. The PM20 countries/topics archive
Page 10
Folders are defined as a combination from two hierarchies
 Countries (and a few other geo entries – c. 450)
 Topical categories (c. 1,400)

57. Page 11
Thanks!
Joachim Neubert
ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics
j.neubert@zbw.eu
http://zbw.eu/labs
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Jneubert
WikiProject 20th Century Press Archives

58. Linked Open Data Ecosystem for the Performing Arts:
Which Place for Wikidata?
Prof. Beat Estermann, Bern University of Applied Sciences
Wikidata Conference, 25 October 2019
Photo: Phantom black light theatre (theatre group HILT), User:Black light theatre Prague, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Unless otherwise noted, the content of these slides is provided under the CC BY 4.0 copyright license.

59. Many reports – one call to action
Over the past five years, the
topic of performing arts
metadata has emerged as one
of the most pressing issues for
the performing arts sector.

60. Production
market
The Vision: Many Stakeholders – One Knowledge Base
Performing Arts Value Network International Knowledge Base for
the Performing Arts
Distributed
Architecture
Key Stakeholders
Usage Scenarios
Source: Estermann / Julien (2019): A Linked Digital Future for the Performing Arts. CAPACOA in cooperation with the Bern University of Applied Sciences.

61. Performing Arts Value Network
Production
market
Based on: Bonet, L., & Schargorodsky, H. (2018). “Theatre management: models and strategies for cultural venues”. Policy, 23(2), 159-173.

62. Stakeholder Requirements Regarding Data Coverage

63. Architecture of Platforms

64. concerts
State of Implementation

65. Swiss Performing Arts Database
concerts
State of Implementation

66. Swiss Performing Arts Database
Wikidata / Wikimedia Commons
concerts
State of Implementation

67. Swiss Performing Arts Database
Wikidata / Wikimedia Commons
Culture Creates
concerts
State of Implementation

68. 1. Immediate focus should be placed on populating a Canadian performing arts
knowledge graph.
2. Wikidata is complementary to Artsdata.ca; efforts should therefore be
undertaken to contribute to its population with performing arts related data.
3. A data governance framework needs to be developed in cooperation with
representatives from across the arts sector to establish who is able to share what
type of data with whom, and who will have authority over which data/information.
4. Further research is needed to better understand user requirements with regard
to the adoption of linked open data practices in existing and emerging service
offerings.
5. Further effort is required to develop and describe novel business models that
leverage and maintain a well-functioning linked open data ecosystem for the
performing arts.
Recommendations by the LDFI Advisory Committee

69. Wikidata and classical LOD are complementary
Wikidata Classical LOD
Strengths
Fully-fledged crowdsourcing platform; further
parties can easily be invited to contribute.
Data owners keep the control over their «graphs»;
data quality and completeness remains under the
control of the data provider.
Immediate integration with the worldwide linked
data cloud (reconciliation at the moment of data
ingest)
Data can be published in RDF format, is linkable;
reconcilation against other databases can be done
step by step.
Community-supported LOD service with a certain
level of reliability
Weaknesses
Monitoring data quality and completeness is a
permanent and challenging task.
Third parties cannot readily fix issues related to data
quality or completeness that are not taken care of by
the data provider.
Harmonization of data modelling practices is a
challenge.
Harmonization of data modelling practices within
one’s own «silo» is straightforward, but might be a
great challenge to implement across «silos».
Perceived «loss of control» by data owners Introducing collaborative data maintenance practices
is difficult.
Many current LOD services are of questionable
reliability.

70. Wikidata in the wider context of the Linked Open Data
Ecosystem for the Performing Arts
When it comes to publishing data on Wikidata, priority should be given to data:
• where it is unclear who would be the «natural» authority in the given area (on a
global scale);
• where there is a high potential for enhancing data through crowdsourcing approaches
(including community or expert sourcing);
• where data is likely to be reused in the context of Wikipedia;
• where international coordination to ensure semantic interoperability of the data is
unlikely to take place elsewhere.
Focus on base registers / authority files and controlled vocabularies first; they facilitate
further interlinking of datasets!

71. From «Sum of All GLAMs» to «Wiki Loves Performing Arts»

72. From «Sum of All GLAMs» to «Wiki Loves Performing Arts»
Sum of All GLAMs Project

73. From «Sum of All GLAMs» to «Wiki Loves Performing Arts»
Sum of All GLAMs Project

74. COST Action: Linked Open Data Ecosystem for the
Performing Arts (LODEPA)
Topics to be covered
• Coordination of data modelling & ontology
development (including controlled vocabularies)
• Base registers, authority data
• Federation (Wikidata, classical LOD approaches)
• Implementation of international campaigns to
supplement data on Wikidata
• Sharing of infrastructure components
• Exchange of best practices regarding governance,
skills development and organizational capacity
building
• Development of business models, international
exchange/transfer of services
• further topics to be collected through interviews with
key stakeholders

75. Thank you for your attention !
Prof. Beat Estermann
Bern University of Applied Sciences
Institute for Public Sector Transformation
beat.estermann@bfh.ch
+41 31 848 34 38
https://linkeddigitalfuture.ca/