Wikipedia | 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:

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.