Wikidata | Daniel Antal

Wikibase as a Data Sharing Space: Connecting Rights, Communities, and GLAM through Federated Infrastructures

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 18:00:00 +0000

In our use scenario, Wikibase Suite provides a federated data-sharing space between Wikimedia projects, Europeana, and other trusted partners.

From the perspective of Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, it serves as a staging area and alternative incubator for datasets that are still under review, have mixed rights status, or originate from specialised community archives.

Key Ideas

Federation: connects open and restricted databases while preserving provenance.
Rights management: allows data to be public domain, under Creative Commons, or shared via local “use policies” such as non-commercial only.
Knowledge stewardship: supports community-led peer review for small or specialist domains that fall outside general Wikimedia governance.

Examples

The Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space integrates recordings, images, and linguistic data for Livonian, Võro, Seto, and Mari communities.
The hudobnadatabaza.sk aims to provide access to all music ever made in Slovakia, weather in print sheets loanable in libraries, webshops in CD or sheet format, or song streaming on Spotify.
The Wikimuseum exhibition model allows GLAM institutions and citizen scientists to co-curate collections without physically moving artefacts.

Simple cultural objects, like photographs can be licensed with simple, standardised license statements, music, video recordings of events may have a bundle of rights that need more careful modelling. There is a lot more than CC-BY-SA to opening up open culture for wide audiences.

Next Steps

Align our Wikibase Ontology with the Wikidata:WikiProject Ontology/Cleaning Task Force to provide better mapping of cultural objects, permissions, duties and rights related to their use.
Improve our exchange mechanism with Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons.
Design better quality checks for the data.

Livestream recording

You can watch the presentation here:

WikiMuseum = GLAM Wiki + Wikibase + Data Sharing Space

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 14:00:00 +0200

14:30–15:00 Our presentation took place in the session
GLAM Cooperation and Community Exhibitions at Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2025 in Thessaloniki.

We invite Wikimedia communities, data curators, AI specialists, GLAM partners, and digital humanists to join us in building a multilingual, interoperable Wikimuseum and extending the Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space.
👉 Read more about this data sharing space

Our talk introduced the Wikimuseum concept: collaborative, multilingual exhibitions that bring together museum objects, archival documents, photographs, and private collections into Wikimedia-powered virtual showcases. As a case study, we presented the Livonian garment exhibition, where dispersed artefacts from Finland, Estonia, and Latvia were digitally reunited for the first time in a century.

We also showed how this approach interlinks with the Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space (FUDSS), a demonstration of a rather complex system built around open knowledge graphs and a showcase of a particularly challenging data governance and curation use case involving FAIR and SAFE standards, different jurisdictions, rarely used languages.

Our federated Wikibase-driven dataspace designed for small, endangered, or diasporic heritage communities. The DSS applies the European Interoperability Framework to cultural data, connecting CIDOC-CRM museum records, DCTERMS library metadata, and Wikibase lexemes, while respecting local epistemologies and multilingual vocabularies.

Highlights

How joint Wikimedia exhibitions allow GLAM institutions and citizen scientists to co-curate without moving artefacts physically.
How multilingual Wikibase lexemes and semantic interoperability support endangered languages like Livonian, Võro, and Mari.
How a Wikibase Suite and Lexeme can provide for an alternative incubator for small communities with modern AI support.

The Wikimuseum Livonian clothing exhibition demo: Traditional Livonian Clothing

Next steps

Extend the Livonian and Seto exhibitions with more garments, and photographs.
Extend our music collections and publish ethnomusicologically relevant datasets.
Align the Wikimuseum model with the ECCCH Heritage Digital Twin Ontology.

Livestream recording

You can watch our presentation here, with two of us slightly pale with the virus that went around in the conference rooms:

TextileBase: Introduction

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 15:00:00 +0200

The July 10 is a hybrid event that you can attend either in person or online. Please register via the contact form or via email. For those who cannot visit this event, we offer an alternative online webinar. (Please fill out your availability here). The start time is 15.00 Central European Summer Time, 14.00 GMT and 16.00 EET. If you physically attend, please arrive a few minutes early.

We warmly invite colleagues, friends, and stakeholders interested in cultural heritage data, digital humanities, and AI-supported research to a light and lively summer seminar on three interconnected initiatives.

Our main focus is on TextileBase – our linked open data platform for dress history
We show a glimpse of our futuristic multi-modal, multi-language graph with data, images, music, audiovisual Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space, as a way to connect clothing history into a broader regional knowledge platform.
And the Wikimuseum concept for wider impact, co-curated collections and exhibitions.

This informal gathering is not about theoretical publications (although we’re happy to send you preprints!). It’s about showcasing how things actually work, especially when archival depth is shallow and data quality is mixed. There’s a big difference between writing about data integration in a computer lab — and actually building tools that work for researchers and cultural institutions across languages, countries, and platforms.

Topics For Discussion

Each speaker will present a short, live demo or walkthrough (10–12 minutes), followed by Q&A and a casual hybrid meet-up.

Daniel Antal: What is TextileBase? Connecting knowledge across museums, archives, libraries, repositories, Europeana, ECCCH, Wikidata.

Anna Márta Mester: Technical, but not Deep Dive: Using the Wikibase Suite, SPARQL endpoints, and Sampo-UI for comfortable scholarly research.

Ieva Pigozne: Use Case: From years to weeks — how Latgalian data curation paved the way for rapid digitisation of Seto and Livonian datasets. Sneak peek: Finno-Ugric clothing.

Kata Gábor: AI for Cultural Heritage: From multilingual NLP to image annotation and ontology enrichment in noisy or sparse data environments.

Asmah Federico: WikiMuseum: A vision for co-curated, multilingual virtual exhibitions with dispersed physical collections.

Wikibase Interfaces

Entry examples from Linked Open Datasets on Garments from the Latgale Region, from right to left: Q142, Q180, Q179, Q181.

In machine-readable format: https://reprexbase.eu/textilebase/Special:EntityData/Q180.ttl

SPARQL Endpoint

We will place here a few sampe querries:

Latgalian Garments Dataset

Sampo UI

We are going to unveil a similar interactive website on the webinar to the OperaSampo; TextileBase will run on Sampo, following dozens of successful digital humanities projects.

Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 10:30:00 +0200

We started experimenting with the legal, organisational, semantic and technical challenges of creating a genuinely trustworthy, AI-supported data-sharing space that can find and connect tangible and intangible elements of the Finno-Ugric cultural universes. We were also seeking a better governance model for oversight for the custodians of these endangered, shrinking universes in their language and with little technical knowledge, partly as alternatives to the established Wikipedia to the open knowledge incubation method for small linguistic minorities.

Meet up with some of our team members, Daniel Antal, Britt-Kathleen Mere, Ieva Pigoze, Bogáta Tímár, and Ieva Vīvere during the conference, and do not forget to check out our presentation at the LP05 Session, Digital Insights in Cultural Research, on Mar 6, 2025 10:30 AM — 11:00 AM, or meet up with Kata Gábor and Dániel Antal in Paris, Anna Mester and Mihály Nagy in Budapest in subsequent workshops.

Read more or take a look at our conference poster below:

Download the poster in pdf

See our presentation made in the DNBH 2025 conference in Tartu:

What are the competencies of the system that we are building?

Please check out the demo version of the Finno-Ugric Dataspace or read the long-form project description.

SKCMDb Presentation on IAMIC 2024

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 10:30:00 +0100

Today, most music is recommended by algorithms—not only to subscribers of platforms like YouTube and Spotify, but also to radio editors, concert promoters, and festival organisers. This shift has led to the conclusion that collective management organisations (CMOs) and music information centres (MICs) must modernise their metadata and publishing practices to remain visible and competitive in the digital age.

Using advanced data enrichment techniques, our platform helps ensure that these institutions have the most accurate, 360° view of the repertoire they represent. We also ensure that digital streaming services and search engines are updated with precise, reliable, and machine-readable musical metadata.

See our presentation made in the IAMIC 2024 conference in Vienna:

Our goal is to ensure that MICs and CMOs maintain the most up-to-date information about musical works. Whenever data is missing or outdated, we retrieve it from authoritative sources and deliver it automatically into their systems—ready for review by human curators.

We aim to make all music in Slovakia visible across global music discovery platforms, encyclopaedias, Europeana, and the European Cultural Heritage Cloud. This includes helping users locate sheet music for sale or loan, as well as showing where each piece can be heard—whether via streaming, radio, or public archives.

To achieve this, we provide:

We want to ensure that a MICs and CMOs have the most accurate information about music. Whenever data is missing or new information has yet to reach their database, we try to look up the data from reliable sources and ensure that it arrives automatically in their system (to be reviewed by a knowledgeable human curator).
Make all music in Slovakia visible on all global music systems, encyclopaedia, Europeana and the European Cultural Heritage Cloud. Enable people to locate sheets of works for sale or public lending and show where people can listen to the music in various formats.
Provide the information in a dual format: enable a MIC to provide machine-readable, standardised, RDF annotated data to directly support the recommender systems of Spotify, YouTube, Deezer and other platforms.
Provide CMOs with a framework to make their members more visible to digital streaming platforms by enrichment, control and processing of available metadata and to also inform radio stations about the potential recordings that count into their local content, thus promoting local CMO members.

Read more or take a look at our conference poster below:

Download the poster in pdf

Building a music data sharing space with Wikibase

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 14:00:00 +0200

Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2024 (#WMCEE) is an annual conference centered on Wikimedia projects (Wikipedia and other related projects) in countries of Central and Eastern Europe (more recently, also in Central Asia). It features presentations on Wikimedia projects, other wikis, free/open source software, free knowledge and free content, and these topics’ social and technical aspects.

Building a music data sharing space with Wikibase

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 14:00:00 +0200

Next: ️> or Space | Previous :️<
Start: Home | Finish: End
Overview: Esc| Speaker notes: S
Zoom: Alt + Click️| Fullscreen: F

🖱 Highlighted text: clickable link (to our project page.) Best view with Full screen.

What we actually do?

Questions?

Ask: Email | Keybase

LinkedIn: Daniel Antal, CFA | Reprex

Connecting Collection and Repertoire Management to Wikidata

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 10:48:00 +0100

Tools to connect photographs about Béla Bartók collecting songs to the songs he collected and their modern interpretations. As sound recordings, journal articles and books at the same place. Regardless in which country and what type of institution it is catalogued and made available.

We love Wikidata, because we believe in open knowledge, and we believe in linking open data, and Wikidata is the easiest, most open, most accessible way to place information on linked open knowledge graphs.

Linking open data can make songs, films, books, photographs easier to find, to reuse. To connect photographs about Béla Bartók collecting songs to the songs he collected and their modern interpretations. The book of War and Peace with the locations in Leo Tolstoy’s monumental work. And then with other locations that were dubbing in the recent BBC adoption of the book. And connect them with the earlier one, filmed in the former Yugoslavia.

Reprex is seeking partners to connect archive and collection inventories automatically, actively rights-managed music, film, and photography catalogues to link public archive, rights management metadata via Wikidata into a self-correcting metadata system, improving and ensuring that machines find the correct information about European or global cultural content. We want to build an open-source tool to make this process automatic and painless.

The BBC’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s novel, much of which was filmed in Lithuania, sparked sparked huge interest in the country abroad. The series featured Vilnius’ Old Town and major sights in Vilnius including Gediminas Castle, Vilnius University and other areas like Trakų Vokė. More than six million British viewers tuned in for its first episode in January.

Our next product is the development of an open source tool (and an app) that brings your reliable catalogue or collection information to the format of Wikidata. It will show what is already known about your collection or catalogue items “on the internet” and selects information that can be filled or improved, and provides a connection to the mass uploader.

A video tutorial on how to use QuickStatements to bulk upload data onto Wikidata by Dr Sara Thomas, Scotland Programme Coordinator, Wikimedia UK.

Providing a proper data representation to historically underrepresented groups, like women in the example of bulk updating monument data about monumental women by Dr Sara Thomas, or films from small countries, literature from small languages, or niche genre music is essential in the era of AI. Current global platforms for music, film, books, use machine learning that are trained on large open datasets like Wikidata and connecting sources. These automated systems, like automatic recommendations, will not recommend to suitable audiences this diverse content that lower quality or lacking machine-readable metadata representation.

Links

University of Edinburgh Media Hopper Create: How to use QuickStatements - a tool to bulk upload data onto Wikidata by Hannah Rothmann, September 7th, 2020.
Lithuania Tribune: War and Peace tourist trail launches in Vilnius, March 31, 2016.
Wikidata: Linked open data workflow

Wikidata | Daniel Antal

Wikibase as a Data Sharing Space: Connecting Rights, Communities, and GLAM through Federated Infrastructures

Key Ideas

Examples

Next Steps

Livestream recording

WikiMuseum = GLAM Wiki + Wikibase + Data Sharing Space

Highlights

Next steps

Livestream recording

TextileBase: Introduction

Topics For Discussion

Wikibase Interfaces

SPARQL Endpoint

Sampo UI

Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space

What are the competencies of the system that we are building?

SKCMDb Presentation on IAMIC 2024

Building a music data sharing space with Wikibase

Building a music data sharing space with Wikibase

Slide navigation

What we actually do?

Questions?

Connecting Collection and Repertoire Management to Wikidata