Hi, guys! Can everybody hear me?
So, hi! Nice to meet you all. I'm Erica Azzellini.
I'm one of the Wikimovement Brazil's Liaison,
and this is my first international Wikimedia event,
so I'm super excited to be here and I hopefully,
*will share something interesting for you all here on this lengthy talk.*
*So this work starts with research that I was developing in Brazil,*
*Computational Journalism and Structured Narratives with Wikidata.*
*So in journalism,*
*they're using some natural language generation software*
*for automating news*
*for news that have quite similar narrative structure.*
*And we developed this concept here of structured narratives,*
*thinking about this practice on computational journalism,*
*that is the development of verbal text, understandable by humans,*
*automated from predetermined arrangements that process information*
*from structured databases, which looks like that,*
*the Wikimedia universe and on this tool that we developed.*
*So, when I'm talking about verbal text understandable by humans,*
*I'm talking about Wikipedia entries.*
*When I'm talking about structured databases,*
*of course, I'm talking about Wikidata here.*
*And predetermined arrangement, I'm talking about Mbabel,*
*that is this tool.*
*The Mbabel tool was inspired by a template* *by user Pharos, right here in front of me,*
*thank you very much,*
*and it was developed with Ederporto that is right here too,*
*the brilliant Ederporto.*
*We developed this tool*
*that automatically generates Wikipedia entries*
*based on information from Wikidata.*
*We actually do some thematic templates*
*that are created on the Wikidata module,*
*WikidataIB Module,*
*and these templates are pre-determined, generic and editable templates*
*for various article themes.*
*We realized that many Wikipedia entries had a quite similar structured narrative*
*so we could create a tool that automatically generates that*
*for many Wikidata items.*
*Until now we have templates for museums, works of art, books, films,*
*journals, earthquakes, libraries, archives,*
*and Brazilian municipal and state elections, and growing.*
*So, everybody here is able to contribute and create new templates.*
*Each narrative template includes an introduction, Wikidata infobox,*
*section suggestions for the users,*
*content tables or lists with Listeria, depending on the case,*
*references and categories, and of course the sentences,*
*that are created with the Wikidata information.*
*I'm gonna show you in a sec an example of that.*
*It's an integration with Wikipedia, integration with Wikidata,*
*so the more properties properly filled on Wikidata,*
*the more text entries you'll get on your article stub.*
*That's very important to highlight here.*
*Structuring this Wikidata can get more complex*
*as I'm going to show you on the election projects that we've made.*
*So I'm going to let you hear this Wikidata Lab XIV for you*
*after this lengthy talk*
*that is very brief, so you'll be able to choose*
*on the work that we've been doing on structuring Wikidata*
*for this purpose too.*
*We have this challenge to build a narrative template*
*that is generic enough to cover different Wikidata items*
*and to suppress the gender*
*and the number of difficulties of languages,*
*and still sounding natural for the user*
*because we don't want to sound like it doesn't click for the user*
*to edit after that.*
*This is how the Mbabel looks like on the bottom form.*
*You just have insert the item number there* *and call the desired template*
*and then you have article to edit and expand, and everything.*
*So, more importantly, why we did it? Not because it's cool to develop*
*things here in Wikidata, we know, we all hear, know about it.*
*But we are experimenting this integration from Wikidata to Wikipedia*
*and we want to focus on meaningful individual contributions.*
*So we've been working on education programs*
*and we want the students to feel the value*
*of their entries too, but not only--*
*Oh, five minutes only, Geez, I'm gonna rush here.*
(laughing)
*And we want you all to make tasks for users in general,*
*especially on tables and this kind of content*
*that it's a bit of a rush to do.*
*And we're working on this concept of abstract Wikipedia.*
*Denny Vrandečić wrote an article super interesting about it*
*so I linked here too.*
*And we also want to now support small language communities*
*to fill the lack of content there.*
*This is an example of how we've been using* *this Mbabel tool for GLAM*
*and education programs,*
*and I showed you earlier the bottom form of the Mbabel tool*
*but also we can make red links that aren't exactly empty.*
*So you click on this red link*
*and you automatically have this article draft*
*on your user page to edit.*
*And I'm going to briefly talk about it because I only have some minutes more.*
*On educational projects,*
*we've been doing this with elections in Brazil for journalism students.*
*We have the experience with the [inaudible] students*
*with user Joalpe-- he's not here right now,*
*but we all know him, I think.*
*And we realize that we have the data about Brazilian elections*
*but we don't have media cover on it.*
*So we were lacking also Wikipedia entries on it.*
*How do we insert this meaningful information on Wikipedia*
*that people really access?*
*Next year we're going to have some election,*
*people are going to look for this kind of information on Wikipedia*
*and they simply won't find it.*
*So this tool looks quite useful for this purpose*
*and the students were introduced, not only to Wikipedia,*
*but also to Wikidata.*
*Actually, they were introduced to Wikipedia with Wikidata,*
*which is an experience super interesting and we had a lot of fun,*
*and it was quite challenging to organize all that.*
*We can talk about it later too.*
*And they also added the background and the analysis sections*
*on these elections articles,*
*because we don't want them* *to just simply automate the content there.*
*We can do better.*
*So this is the example I'm going to show you.*
*This is from a municipal election in Brazil.*
*Two minutes... oh my!*
*This example here was entirely created with the Mbabel tool.*
*You have here this introduction text. It really sounds natural for the reader.*
*The Wikidata infobox here--*
*it's a masterpiece of Ederporto right there.*
(laughter)
*And we have here the tables with the election results for each position.*
*And we also have these results here on the textual form too,*
*so it really looks like an article that was made, that was handcrafted.*
*The references here were also made with the Mbabel tool*
*and we used identifiers to build these references here*
*and the categories too.*
*So, to wrap things up here, it is still a work in progress,*
*and we have some challenges on outreach and technical*
*to bring Mbabel to other language communities,*
*especially the smaller ones,*
*and how do we support those tools*
*on lower resource language communities too.*
*And finally, is it possible to create an Mbabel*
*that overcomes language barriers?*
*I think that's a question very interesting for the conference*
*and hopefully we can figure that out together.*
*So, thank you very much, and look for the Mbabel poster downstairs*
*if you like to have all this information wrapped up, okay?*
Thank you.
(audience clapping)
(moderator) I'm afraid we're a little too short for questions
but yes, Erica, as she said, has a poster and is very friendly.
So I'm sure you can talk to her afterwards,
and if there's time at the end, I'll allow it.
But in the meantime, I'd like to bring up our next speaker...
Thank you.
(audience chattering)
Next we've got Yolanda Gil, talking about Wikidata and Geosciences.
Thank you.
I come from the University of Southern California
and I've been working with Semantic Technologies for a long time.
I want to talk about geosciences in particular,
where this idea of crowd-sourcing from the community is very important.
*So I'll give you a sense that individual scientists,*
*most of them in colleges,*
*collect their own data for their particular project.*
*They describe it in their own way.*
*They use their own properties, their own metadata characteristics.*
*This is an example of some collaborators of mine*
*that collect data from a river.*
*They have their own sensors, their own robots,*
*and they study the water quality.*
*I'm going to talk today about an effort that we did to crowdsource metadata*
*for a community that works in paleoclimate.*
*The article just came out so it's in the slides if you're curious,*
*but it's a pretty large community that work together*
*to integrate data more efficiently through crowdsourcing.*
*So, if you've heard of the hockey stick graphics for climate,*
*this is the community that does this.*
*This is a study for climate in the last 200 years,*
*and it takes them literally many years to look at data*
*from different parts of the globe.*
*Each dataset is collected by a different investigator.*
*The data is very, very different,*
*so it takes them a long time to put together*
*these global studies of climate,*
*and our goal is to make that more efficient.*
*So, I've done a lot of work over the years.*
*Going back to 2005, we used to call it,*
*"Knowledge Collection from Web Volunteers"*
*or from netizens at that time.*
*We had a system called "Learner."*
*It collected 700,000 common sense,*
*common knowledge statements about the world.*
*We did a lot of different techniques.*
*The forms that we did to extract knowledge from volunteers*
*really fit the knowledge models, the data models that we used*
*and the properties that we wanted to use.*
*I worked with Denny in the system called "Shortipedia"*
*when he was a Post Doc at ISI,*
*looking at keeping track of the prominence of the assertions,*
*and we started to build on Semantic Media Wiki software.*
*So everything that I'm going to describe today*
*builds on that software,*
*but I think that now we have Wikibase,*
*we'll be starting to work more on Wikibase.*
*So the LinkedEarth is the project* *where we work with paleoclimate scientists*
*to crowdsource the metadata,*
*and seeing the title that we said, "controlled crowdsourcing."*
*So we found a nice niche*
*where we could let them create new properties*
*but we had an editorial process for it.*
*So I'll describe to you how it works.*
*For them, if you're looking at a sample from lake sediments from 200 years ago,*
*you use different properties to describe it*
*than if you have coral sediments that you're looking at*
*or coral samples that you're looking at that you extract from the ocean.*
*Palmyra is a coral atoll in the Pacific.*
*So if you have coral, you care about the species and the genus,*
*but if you're just looking at lake sand, you don't have that.*
*So each type of sample has very different properties.*
*In LinkedEarth, they're able to see in a map*
*where the datasets are.*
*They actually annotate their own datasets* *or the datasets of other researchers*
*when they're using it.*
*So they have a reason why they want certain properties*
*to describe those datasets.*
*Whenever there are disagreements, or whenever there are agreements,*
*there's community discussions about them*
*and they're also polls to decide on what properties to settle.*
*So it's a nice ecosystem. I'll give you examples.*
*You look at a particular dataset, in this case it's a lake in Africa.*
*So you have the category of the page; it can be a dataset,*
*it can be other things.*
*You can download the dataset itself and you have kind of canonical properties*
*that they have all agreed to have for datasets,*
*and then under Extra Information,*
*those are properties that the person describing this dataset,*
*added on their own accord.*
*So these can be new properties.*
*We call them "crowd properties," rather than "core properties."*
*And then when you're describing your dataset,*
*in this case it's an ice core that you got*
*from a glacier dataset,*
*and your'e adding a dataset you want to talk about measurements,*
*you have an offering of all the existing properties*
*that match what you're saying.*
*So we do this search completion so that you can adopt that.*
*That promotes normalization.*
*The core of the properties has been agreed by the community*
*so we're really extending that core.*
*And that core is very important because it gives structure*
*to all the extensions.*
*We engage the community through many different ways.*
*We had one face-to-face meeting at the beginning*
*and after about a year and a half, we do have a new standard,*
*and a new way for them to continue to evolve that standard.*
*They have editors, very much in the Wikipedia style*
*of editorial boards.*
*They have working groups for different types of data.*
*They do polls with the community,*
*and they have pretty nice engagement of the community at large,*
*even if they've never visited our Wiki.*
*The metadata evolves*
*so what we do is that people annotate their datasets,*
*then the schema evolves, the properties evolve*
*and we have an entire infrastructure and mechanisms*
*to re-annotate the datasets with the new structure of the ontology*
*and the new properties.*
*This is described in the paper. I won't go into the details.*
But I think that * having that kind of capability*
*in Wikibase would be really interesting.*
*We basically extended Semantic Media Wiki and Media Wiki*
*to create our own infrastructure.*
*I think a lot of this is now something that we find in Wikibase,*
*but this is older than that.*
*And in general, we have many projects where we look at crowdsourcing*
*not just descriptions of datasets* *but also descriptions of hydrology models,*
*descriptions of multi-step data analytic workflows*
*and many other things in the sciences.*
*So we are also interested in including in Wikidata additional things*
*that are not just datasets or entities*
*but also other things that have to do with science.*
*I think Geosciences are more complex in this sense than Biology, for example.*
*That's it.*
Thank you. (audience clapping)
- Do I have time for questions? - Yes.
(moderator) We have time for just a couple of short questions.
When answering, can go back to the microphone?
- Yes. - Hopefully, yeah.
(audience 1) Does the structure allow tabular datasets to be described
and can you talk a bit about that?
Yes. So the properties of the datasets talk more about who collected them,
what kind of data was collected, what kind of sample it was,
and then there's a separate standard which is called "lipid"
that's complementary and mapped to the properties
that describes the format of the actual files
and the actual structure of the data.
So, you're right that there's both, "how do I find data about x"
but also, "Now, how do I use it?
How do I know where the temperature that I'm looking for
is actually in the file?"
(moderator) This will be the last.
(audience 2) I'll have to make it relevant.
So, you have shown this process of how users can suggest
or like actually already put in properties,
and I didn't fully understand how this thing works,
or what's the process behind it.
Is there some kind of folksonomy approach--obviously--
but how is it promoted into the core vocabulary
if something is promoted?
Yes, yes. It is.
So what we do is we have a core ontology and the initial one was actually
very thoughtfully put together through a lot of discussion
by very few people.
*And then the idea was the whole community can extend that*
*or propose changes to that.*
*So, as they are describing datasets, they can add new properties*
*and those become "crowd properties."*
*And every now and then, the Editorial Committee*
*looks at all of those properties,*
*the working groups look at all of those crowd properties,*
*and decide whether to incorporate them into the main ontology.*
*So it could be because they're used for a lot of dataset descriptions.*
*It could be because they are proposed by somebody*
*and they're found to be really interesting* *or key, or uncontroversial.*
*So there's an entire editorial process to incorporate those new crowd properties*
or the folksonomy part of it,
but they are really built around the core of the ontology.
The core ontology then grows with more crowd properties
and then people propose additional crowd properties again.
So we've gone through a couple of these iterations
of rolling out a new core, and then extending it,
and then rolling out a new core and then extending it.
- (audience 2) Great. Thank you. - Thanks.
(moderator) Thank you. (audience applauding)
(moderator) Thank you, Yolanda.
And now we have Adam Shorn with "Something About Wikibase,"
according to the title.
Uh... where's the internet? There it is.
So, I'm going to do a live demo, which is probably a bad idea
*but I'm going to try and do it as the birthday present later*
*so I figure I might as well try it here.*
*And I also have some notes on my phone because I have no slides.*
*So, two years ago, I made these Wikibase doc images*
*that quite a few people have tried out,*
*and even before then, I was working on another project,*
*which is kind of ready now, and here it is.*
It's a website that allows you * to instantly create a Wikibase*
with a query service and quick statements,
without needing to know about any of the technical details,
without needing to manage any of them either.
There are still lots of features to go and there's still some bugs,
but here goes the demo.
Let me get my emails up ready... because I need them too...
Da da da... Stopwatch.
Okay.
So it's a simple as... at the moment it's locked down behind...
Oh no! German keyboard!
(audience laughing)
Foiled... okay.
Okay.
(audience continues to laugh)
Aha! Okay.
I'll remember that for later. (laughs)
Yes.
♪ (humming) ♪
Oh my god... now it's American.
All you have to do is create an account...
da da da...
Click this button up here...
Come up with a name for Wiki-- "Demo1"
"Demo user"
Agree to the terms which don't really exist yet.
(audience laughing)
Click on this thing which isn't a link.
And then you have your Wikibase.
(audience cheers and claps)
*Anmelden* in German.
Demo... oh god! I'm learning lots about my demo later.
1-6-1-4-S-G...
- (audience 3) Y... - (Adam) It's random.
(audience laughing)
Oh, come on.... (audience laughing)
Oh no. It's because this is a capital U...
(audience chattering)
6-1-4....
S-G-ENJ...
Is J... oh no. That's... oh yeah. Okay.
I'm really... I'm gonna have to look at the laptop
that I'm doing this on later.
Cool...
Da da da da da...
Maybe I should have some things in my clipboard ready.
Okay, so now I'm logged in.
Oh... keyboards.
So you can go and create an item...
*Yeah, maybe I should make a video. It might be easier.*
*So, yeah. You can make items, you have quick statements here*
*that have... oh... it is all in German.*
(audience laughing)
(sighs)
*Oh, log in? Log in?*
*It has... Oh, set up ready.*
*Da da da...*
*It's as easy as...*
*I learned how to use Quick Statements yesterday...*
*that's what I know how to do.*
*I can then go back to the Wiki...*
*We can go and see in Recent Changes*
*that there are now two items, the one that I made*
*and the one from Quick Statements...*
*and then you go to Quick...*
♪ (hums a tune) ♪
*Stop...no...*
*No... *
(audience laughing)
*Oh god...*
*I'm glad I tried this out in advance.*
*There you go. And the query service is updated.*
(audience clapping)
*And the idea of this is it'll allow people to try out Wikibases.*
*Hopefully, it'll even be able to allow people to...*
*have their real Wikibases here.*
At the moment you can create as many as you want
and they all just appear in this lovely list.
As I said, there's lots of bugs but it's all super quick.
Exactly how this is going to continue in the future, we don't know yet
because I only finished writing this in the last few days.
It's currently behind an invitation code so that if you want to come try it out,
come and talk to me.
And if you have any other comments or thoughts, let me know.
Oh, three minutes...40. That's... That's not that bad.
Thanks.
(audience clapping)
Any questions?
(audience 5) Does the Quick Statements and the Query Service
are automatically updated?
Yes. So the idea is that there will be somebody,
at the moment, me,
maintaining all of the horrible stuff
that you don't have to behind the scenes.
So kind of think of it like GitHub.com,
but you don't have to know anything about Git to use it. It's just all there.
- [inaudible] - Yeah, we'll get that.
But any of those big hosted solution things.
- (audience 6) A feature request. - Yes.
Is there any-- In Scope
do you have plans on making it so you can easily import existing...
- Wikidata... - I have loads of plans.
Like I want there to be a button where you can just import
another whole Wikibase and all of--yeah.
There will, in the future list that's really long. Yeah.
(audience 7) I understand that it's... you want to make it user-friendly
but if I want to access to the machine itself, can I do that?
Nope. (audience laughing)
So again, like, in the longer term future, there are possib...
Everything's possible, but at the moment, no.
(audience 8) Two questions. Is there a plan to have export tools
so that you can export it to your own Wikibase maybe at some point?
- Yes. - Great.
And is this a business?
I have no idea. (audience laughing)
Not currently.
(audience 9) What if I stop using it tomorrow,
how long will the data be there?
So my plan was at the end of WikidataCon I was going to delete all of the data
and there's a Wikibase Workshop on a Sunday,
and we will maybe be using this for the Wikibase workshop
so that everyone can have their own Wikibase.
And then, from that point, I probably won't be deleting the data
so it will all just stay there.
(moderator) Question.
(audience 10) It's two minutes...
Alright, fine. I'll allow two more questions if you talk quickly.
(audience laughing)
- Alright, good people. - Thank you, Adam.
Thank you for letting me test my demo... I mean...
I'm going to do it different. (audience clapping)
(moderator) Thank you.
Now we have Dennis Diefenbach presenting *Q Answer.*
Hello, I'm Dennis Diefenbach, I would like to present *Q-Answer*
which is a question-answering system on top of Wikidata.
So, what we need are some questions and this is the interface of QAnswer.
For example, where is WikidataCon?
*Alright, I think it's written like this.*
*2019... And we get this response which is Berlin.*
*So, other questions. For example, "When did Wikidata start?"*
*It started the 30 October 2012 so it's birthday is approaching.*
*It is 6 years old, so it will be their 7th birthday.*
*Who is developing Wikidata?*
*The Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland,*
*so thank you very much to them.*
*Something like museums in Berlin... I don't know why this is not so...*
*Only one museum... no, yeah, a few more.*
*So, when you ask something like this,*
*we allow the user to explore the information*
*with different aggregations.*
*For example, if there are many geo coordinates*
*attached to the entities, we will display a map.*
*If there are many images attached to them,* *we will display the images,*
*and otherwise there is a list where you can explore*
*the different entities.*
*You can ask something like "Who is the mayor of Berlin,"*
*"Give me politicians born in Berlin," and things like this.*
*So you can both ask keyword questions and foreign natural language questions.*
*The whole data is coming from Wikidata*
*so all entities which are in Wikidata are queryable by this service.*
*And the data is really all from Wikidata*
*in the sense, there are some Wikipedia snippets,*
*there are images from Wikimedia Commons,*
*but the rest is all Wikidata data.*
*We can do this in several languages. This is now in Chinese.*
*I don't know what is written there so do not ask me.*
*We are currently supporting this languages* *with more or less good quality*
*because... yeah.*
*So, how can this be useful for the Wikidata community?*
*I think there are different reasons.*
*First of all, this thing helps you to generate SPARQL queries*
*and I know there are even some workshops about how to use SPARQL.*
*It's not a language that everyone speaks.*
*So, if you ask something like "a philosopher born before 1908,"*
*to figure out, to construct a SPARQL query like this could be tricky,*
*In fact when you ask a question, we generate many SPARQL queries*
*and the first one is always the thing, the SPARQL query where we think*
*this is the good one.*
*So, if you ask your question and then you go on SPARQL list,*
*then there is this button for the Wikidata query service*
*and you have the SPARQL query right there and you will get the same result*
*as you would get in the interface.*
*Another thing where it could be useful for*
*is for finding missing contextual information.*
*For example, if you ask for actors in "The Lord of the Rings,"*
*most of these entities will have associated an image*
*but not all of them.*
*So here there is some missing metadata that could be added.*
*You could go to this entity at an image*
*and then see first that there is an image missing and so on.*
*Another thing is that you could find schema issues.*
*For example, if you ask "books by Andrea Camilleri,"*
*which is a famous Italian writer,*
*you would currently get these three books.*
*But he wrote many more. He wrote more than 50.*
*And so the question is, are they not in Wikidata*
*or is maybe my knowledge not correctly currently like it is.*
*And in this case, I know there is another book from him,*
*which is "Un mese con Montalbano."*
*It has only an Italian label so you can only search it in Italian.*
*And if you go to this entity, you will say that he has written it.*
*It's a short story by Andrea Camilleri and it's an instance of literary work,*
*but it's not instance of book*
*so that's the reason why it doesn't appear.*
*This is a way to track where things are missing*
*in the Wikidata model*
*not as you would expect.*
*Another reason is just to have fun.*
*I imagine that many of you added many Wikidata entities*
*so just search for the ones that you care most*
*or you have edited yourself.*
*So in this case, who developed QAnswer, and that's it.*
*For any other questions, go to www.QAnswer.eu/qa*
*and hopefully we'll find an answer for you.*
(audience clapping)
- Sorry. - I'm just the dumbest person here.
(audience 11) So I want to know how is this kind of agnostic
to Wikibase instance,
or has it been tied to the exact like property numbers
and things in Wikidata?
Has it learned in some way or how was it set up?
There is training data and we rely on training data
and this is also most of the cases why you will not get good resutls.
But we're training the system by the simple yes and no answer.
When you ask a question, and we ask always for feedback, yes or no,
and this feedback is used by the machine learning algorithm.
This is where machine learning comes into play.
But basically, we put up separate Wikibase instances
and we can plug this in.
In fact, the system is agnostic in the sense that it only wants RDF.
And RDF, you have in each Wikibase,
there are some few configurations
but you can have this on top of any Wikibase.
(audience 11) Awesome.
(audience 12) You mentioned that it's being trained by yes/no answers.
So I guess this is assuming that the Wikidata instance is free of errors
or is it also...?
You assume that the Wikidata instances...
(audience 12) I guess I'm asking, like, are you distinguishing
between source level errors or misunderstanding the question
versus a bad mapping, etc.?
Generally, we assume that the data in Wikidata is true.
So if you click "no" and the data in Wikidata would be false,
then yeah... we would not catch this difference.
But sincerely, Wikidata quality is very good,
so I rarely have had this problem.
(audience 12) Is this data available as a dataset by any chance, sir?
- What is... direct service? - The... dataset of...
"is this answer correct versus the query versus the answer?"
Is that something you're publishing as part of this?
- The training data that you've... - We published the training data.
We published some old training data but no, just a--
There is a question there. I don't know if we have still time.
(audience 13) Maybe I just missed this but is it running on a live,
like the Live Query Service,
or is it running on some static dump you loaded
or where is the data source for Wikidata?
Yes. The problem is to apply this technology,
you need a local dump.
Because we do not rely only on the SPARQL end point,
we rely on special indexes.
So, we are currently loading the Wikidata dump.
We are updating this every two weeks.
We would like to do it more often,
in fact we would like to get the difs for each day, for example,
to put them in our index.
But unfortunately, right now, the Wikidata dumps are released
only once every week.
So, we cannot be faster than that and we also need some time
to re-index the data, so it takes one or two days.
So we are always behind. Yeah.
(moderator) Any more?
- Okay, thank you very much. - Thank you all very much.
(audience clapping)
(moderator) And now last, we have Eugene Alvin Villar,
talking about Panandâ.
Good afternoon, my name is Eugene Alvin Villar
and I'm from the Philippines, and I'll be talking about Panandâ:
a mobile app powered by Wikidata.
This is a follow-up to my lightning talk that I presented two years ago
at WikidataCon 2017 together with Carlo Moskito.
You can download the slides
and there's a link to that presentation there.
I'll give you a bit of a background.
Wiki Society of the Philippines, formerly, Wikimedia Philippines,
had a series of projects related to Philippine heritage and history.
So we have the usual photo contests, *Wikipedia Takes Manila,*
*Wiki Loves Monuments,*
and then our media project was *Cultural Heritage Mapping Project*
*back in 2014-2015.*
*In that project, we trained volunteers to edit articles*
*related to cultural heritage.*
*This is our biggest, and most successful project that we had.*
*794 articles were created or improved, including 37 "Did You Knows"*
*and 4 "Good Articles,"*
*and more than 5,000 images were uploaded to Commons.*
*As a result of that, we then launched*
*the* Encyclopedia of Philippine Heritage *program*
*in order to expand the scope and also include Wikidata in the scope.*
*Here's the Core Team: myself, Carlo and Roel.*
*Our first pilot project was to document the country's historical markers*
*in Wikidata and Commons,*
*starting with those created by our historical national agency, NHCP.*
*For example, they installed a marker for our national hero, here in Berlin,*
*so there's no Wikidata page for that marker *
*and a collection of photos of that marker in Commons.*
*Unfortunately, the government agency does not keep a good database*
*up-to-date or complete of their markers,*
*so we have to painstakingly input these to Wikidata manually.*
*After careful research and confirmation, here's a graph of the number of markers*
*that we've added to Wikidata over time, over the past three years.*
*And we've developed this Historical Markers Map web app*
*that lets users view these markers on a map,*
*so we can browse it as a list, view a good visualization of the markers*
*with information and inscriptions.*
*All of this is powered by Live Query from Wikidata Query Service.*
*There's the link if you want to play around with it.*
*And so we developed a mobile app for this one.*
*To better publicize our project, I developed the* Panandâ
*which is Tagalog for "marker", as an android app,*
*that was published back in 2018,*
*and I'll publish the IOS version sometime in the future, hopefully.*
*I'd like to demo the app but we have no time,*
*so here are some of the features of the app.*
*There's a Map and a List view, with text search,*
*so you can drill down as needed.*
*You can filter by region or by distance,*
*and whether you have marked these markers,*
*as either you have visited them or you'd like to bookmark them*
*for future visits.*
*Then you can use your GPS on your mobile phone*
*to use for distance filtering.*
*For example, if I want markers that are near me, you can do that.*
*And when you click on the Details page, you can see the same thing,*
*photos from Commons, inscription about the marker,*
*how to find the marker, its location and address, etc.*
*And one thing that's unique for this app is you can, again, visit *
*or put a bookmark of these, so on the map or on the list,*
*or on the Details page,*
*you can just tap on those buttons and say that you've visited them,*
*or you'd like to bookmark them for future visits.*
*And my app has been covered by the press and given recognition,*
*so plenty of local press articles.*
*Recently, it was selected as one of the Top 5 finalists*
*for the Android Masters competition in the App for Social Good category.*
*The final event will be next month.*
*Hopefully, we'll win.*
*Okay, so some behind the scenes.*
*How did I develop this app?*
*Panandâ is actually a hybrid app, it's not native.*
*Basically it's just a web app packaged as a mobile app*
*using Apache Cordova.*
*That reduces development time*
*because I don't have to learn a different language.*
*I know JavaScript, HTML.*
*It's cross-platform, allows code reuse from the Historical Markers Map.*
*And the app is also FIN Open Source. under the MIT license.*
*So there's the GitHub repository over there.*
*The challenge is the apps data is not live.*
*Because if you query the data live,*
*it means you pulling around half a megabyte of compressed JSON every time*
*which is not friendly for those on mobile data,*
*incurs too much delay when starting the app, *
*and if there are any errors in Wikidata, that may result in poor user experience.*
*So instead, what I did was the app is updated every few months*
*with fresh data, compiled using a Perl script*
*that queries Wikidata Query Service,*
*and this script also does some data validation*
*to highlight consistency or schema errors,* *so that allows fixes before updates*
*in order to provide a good experience for the mobile user.*
*And here's the... if you're tech-oriented,* *here's the more or less,*
*the technologies that I'm using.*
*So a bunch of JavaScript libraries.*
*Here's the first script that queries Wikidata,*
*some Cordova plug-ins,*
*and building it using Cordova and then publishing this app.*
*And that's it.*
(audience clapping)
(moderator) I hope you win. Alright, questions.
(audience 14) Sorry if I missed this.
Are you opening your code so the people can adapt your app
and do it for other cities?
Yes, as I've mentioned, the app is free and open source,
- (audience 14) But where is it? - There's the GitHub repository.
You can download the slides, and there's a link
in one of the previous slides to the repository.
(audience 14) Okay. Can you put it?
Yeah, at the bottom.
(audience 15) Hi. Sorry, maybe I also missed this,
but how do you check for a schema errors?
Basically, we have a Wikiproject on Wikidata,
so we try to put the other guidelines on how to model these markers correctly.
Although it's not updated right now.
As far as I know, we're the only country
that's currently modeling these in Wikidata.
There's also an effort to add [inaudible]
in Wikidata,
but I think that's a different thing altogether.
(audience 16) So I guess this may be part
of this Wikiproject you just described,
but for the consistency checks, have you considered moving those
into like complex schema constraints that then can be flagged
on the Wikidata side for what there is to fix on there?
I'm actually interested in seeing if I can do, for example,
shape expressions, so that, yeah, we can do those things.
(moderator) At this point, we have quite a few minutes left.
The speakers did very well, so if Erica is okay with it,
I'm also going to allow some time for questions,
still about this presentation, but also about Mbabel,
if anyone wants to jump in with something there,
either presentation is fair game.
Unless like me, you're all so dazzled that you just want to go to snacks
and think about it. (audience giggles)
- (moderator) You know... - Yeah.
(audience 17) I will always have questions about everything.
So, I came in late for the Mbabel tool.
But I was looking through and I saw there's a number of templates,
and I was wondering if there's a place to contribute
to adding more templates for different types
or different languages and the like?
(Erica) So for now, we're developing those narrative templates
on Portuguese Wikipedia.
I can show you if you like.
We're inserting those templates on English Wikipedia too.
It's not complicated to do but we have to expand for other languages.
- French? - French.
- Yes. - French and German already have.
(laughing)
Yeah.
(inaudible chatter)
(audience 18) I also have a question about Mbabel,
which is, is this really just templates?
Is this based on the LUA scripting? Is that all? Wow. Okay.
Yeah, so it's very deployable. Okay. Cool.
(moderator) Just to catch that for the live stream,
the answer was an emphatic nod of the head, and a yes.
(audience laughing)
- (Erica) Super simple. - (moderator) Super simple.
(audience 19) Yeah. I would also like to ask.
Sorry I haven't delved into Mbabel earlier.
I'm wondering, you're working also with the links, the red links.
Are you adding some code there?
- (Erica) For the lists? - Wherever the link comes from...
(audience 19) The architecture. Maybe I will have to look into it.
(Erica) I'll show you later.
(moderator) Alright. You're all ready for snack break, I can tell.
So let's wrap it up.
But our kind speakers, I'm sure will stick around
if you have questions for them.
Please join me in giving... first of all we didn't give a round of applause yet.
I can tell you're interested in doing so.
(audience clapping)