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Technical Usability of Wikidata’s Linked Data

Evaluation of Machine Interoperability and Data Interpretability

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Business Information Systems Workshops (BIS 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 373))

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Abstract

Wikidata is an outstanding data source with potential application in many scenarios. Wikidata provides its data openly in RDF. Our study aims to evaluate the usability of Wikidata as a data source for robots operating on the web of data, according to specifications and practices of linked data, the Semantic Web and ontology reasoning. We evaluated from the perspective of two use cases of data crawling robots, which are guided by our general motivation to acquire richer data for Europeana, a data aggregator from the Cultural Heritage domain. The first use case regards general data consumption applications based on RDF, RDF-Schema, OWL, SKOS and linked data. The second case regards applications that explore semantics relying on Schema.org and SKOS. We conclude that a human operator must assist linked data applications to interpret Wikidata’s RDF because of the choices that were taken at Wikidata in the definition of its expression in RDF. The semantics of the RDF output from Wikidata is “locked-in” by the usage of Wikidata’s own ontology, resulting in the need for human intervention. Wikidata is only a few steps away from high quality machine interpretation, however. It contains extensive alignment data to RDF, RDFS, OWL, SKOS and Schema.org, but a machine interpretation of those alignments can only be done if some essential Wikidata alignment properties are known.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://europeana.eu.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/netwerk-digitaal-erfgoed/.

  3. 3.

    https://bbcarchdev.github.io/res/.

  4. 4.

    https://bbcarchdev.github.io/res/collections.

  5. 5.

    The Europeana Network is a community of 1,700 experts with the shared mission to expand and improve access to Europe's digital cultural heritage, in the organization they work for and/or by contributing to shape Europeana’s services.

  6. 6.

    https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P727.

  7. 7.

    https://github.com/nfreire/Open-Data-Acquisition-Framework/blob/master/opaf-documentation/SpecifyingLodDatasetForEuropeana.md.

  8. 8.

    https://pro.europeana.eu/project/data-quality-committee.

  9. 9.

    https://github.com/nfreire/data-aggregation-lab/blob/master/data-aggregation-casestudies/documentation/wikidata/SchemaOrg-ontology-alignments-listing.md.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partly supported by Portuguese national funds through Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) with reference UID/CEC/50021/2019, and by the European Commission under contract number 30-CE-0885387/00-80.e.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. INESC-ID, Lisbon, Portugal

    Nuno Freire

  2. Europeana Foundation, The Hague, The Netherlands

    Antoine Isaac

  3. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Antoine Isaac

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  1. Nuno Freire
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  2. Antoine Isaac
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Correspondence to Nuno Freire .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Poznań University of Economics and Business, Poznan, Poland

    Witold Abramowicz

  2. University of Seville, Seville, Spain

    Rafael Corchuelo

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Freire, N., Isaac, A. (2019). Technical Usability of Wikidata’s Linked Data. In: Abramowicz, W., Corchuelo, R. (eds) Business Information Systems Workshops. BIS 2019. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 373. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36691-9_47

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36691-9_47

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