This file hosts a contribution to the ArchivesSpace Online Forum taking place on 18 March 2019. It was submitted shortly before the deadline on February 18, 2019.
Integrating archival workflows with Wikidata
Over the past several years, interest in leveraging Wikidata as an open knowledge base has been growing in areas ranging from cultural heritage institutions to research and technology organizations. With its inherent multilinguality, human-editable interface, community-driven approach to data modeling and curation, systemic connection to Wikipedia and sister projects and alignment with the FAIR Principles for sharing data, there is an emerging consensus that Wikidata represents a significant step for turning Linked Open Data into a practical and useful technology. It provides a bridge between the many siloed knowledge bases that have emerged since Tim Berners-Lee first proposed the notion of the semantic web. Despite this growing interest, there is still a fundamental lack of understanding of what Wikidata's strengths and weaknesses are, or those of Wikibase—the engine behind Wikidata. While experiments have been proliferating with the use of Wikibase, it is still very much an open question how to create a sustainable, federated ecosystem of knowledge bases to support open research, and what the social, technical, institutional barriers are towards this vision.
This presentation will be given on the basis of https://github.com/Daniel-Mietchen/events/blob/master/ArchivesSpace-Online-Forum-2019-wikis.md and focus on how archival workflows can be integrated with Wikidata or Wikibase, particularly to foster broad accessibility to humans and machines, including for collaborative curation.