Wikibase4Research

Wikibase4Research is a free and open source suite of tools for the storage and management of Linked Open Data (LOD).

Wikibase and Wikidata are two related software packages from the Wikimedia family of applications. They allow the storage and management of Linked Open Data (LOD), besides featuring other common characteristics of wikis, such as collaboration and version control features. Wikidata is the public-facing instance of the software – a type of Wikipedia for structured data; it is maintained by Wikimedia Germany. Wikibase is the open source software environment built to run Wikidata. Crucially, Wikibase can be deployed independently from Wikidata (and Wikimedia) and can be customized to suit the needs of individual data domains and data repositories. The Wikibase4Research service provides such customised Wikibase instances for the NFDI4Culture community.

Use Cases

Use Case #1 Wikibase4Research in University or cultural institution research

Context: A research project connected to storing and indexing text- and/or image-based data from cultural corpora

User Groups:

  • Academic staff and researchers;
  • Cultural institution staff;
  • General public;

Key requirements:

  • Collaborative editing via Wikibase, as well as reconciliation and upload via OpenRefine;
  • Compliance with standard ontologies (e.g. CIDOC-CRM) and links to authority data (e.g. GeoNames, VIAF);
  • Access to filter and query the data, including a SPARQL endpoint;
  • Possibility to connect to multiple custom-built frontend applications;

Use Case #2 Wikibase4Research in Cultural heritage preservation

Context: A preservation project focused around object- and/or people-related data

User Groups:

  • Researchers;
  • Curators;
  • General public;

Key requirements:

  • Collaborative editing via Wikibase, as well as reconciliation and upload via OpenRefine;
  • Compliance with standard ontologies (e.g. CIDOC-CRM) and links to authority data (e.g. GeoNames, VIAF);
  • Access to filter and query the data, including a SPARQL endpoint;
  • Possibility to connect to multiple custom-built frontend applications;

Use Case #3 Wikibase4Research as Backend LOD software to connect to other frontend applications

Context: Development of the SemanticKompakkt service

SemanticKompakkt information architecture diagram

User Groups:

  • Software application developers;
  • Digital humanities researchers;

Key requirements:

  • API and SPARQL endpoint that enable connection to other services;
  • Open source and customizable with a variety of specialist extensions;
  • Efficient and streamlined deployment process;

Service Architecture

Software Stack:

Infrastructure options:

  • Self-hosted private instance, deployed via Docker
  • Hosted instance maintained at TIB, deployed via Docker

Code repository:

Contact

Further Information

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