Wikidata, Wikibase, & a federated ecosystem of knowledge - Dario Taraborelli, Daniel Mietchen
Channel: FORCE11
Date: 19/11/2018

Over the past several years, interest in leveraging Wikidata as an open knowledge base has been growing in areas ranging from cultural heritage institutions and libraries 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 in the more than two decades 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 . We would like to use this session as an opportunity to identify and discuss user stories from researchers and practitioners working on open research infrastructure and understand what a model could be to get more groups onboard to design a possible path towards this vision.

https://www.force11.org/meetings/force2018