*Willkommen, Bienvenue*-- Welcome.
I always wanted to say that on a stage.
(laughter)
This is going to be inspirational,
because this is the official Wikibase inspiration panel
of WikidataCon 2019.
The point of this panel is to be inspired by all the things
that people, in various countries, in various fields, do with Wikibase,
the software behind Wikidata.
I was really surprised to learn today that someone came to me and said,
"I learned about Wikibase the first time today."
So, it is the software that runs Wikidata.
And if you want to order things in the world
the way Wikidata orders things in the world,
but you don't agree with the items that we have in there,
because you might need a finer level of granularity,
or maybe you don't want to start with Q1, which is the universe,
because in your little world, Q1 could be a book, if you are a library,
or it could be some kind of animal, if you work in biology,
or it could be a historic person, if you do digital humanities,
but you still want the same system of ordering,
then Wikibase is the thing for you.
Over the last one or two years, we have made contact
with extraordinary people, who are pioneers, who are trailblazing,
who are evaluating Wikibase,
and who are doing extremely great stuff with that.
This panel is going to be very rushed.
Every one of the participants of this panel would have deserved
a one-hour slot to present their thing.
But our program is packed.
So, yeah, keep your seat belt fastened for a fast-paced ride
through the inspirational world of Wikibases.
And the first one is a project from two organizations,
which is a little sensation in itself.
The Bibliothèque nationale de France, the French National Library,
and Abes, which is an authority for higher education.
But I think you will talk about that more in your presentation,
and yeah, we'd like to welcome Anila Angjeli and Benjamin Bober
on stage for the first ten minutes of inspiration.
(applause)
Hi, everybody.
So, yeah, my name is Benjamin Bober.
So, I work for Abes,
which stands for Higher Education Agency,
Bibliographic Higher Education Agency.
Basically, we work with all the university libraries in France,
and manage the union catalog.
And also their authority files.
And I'm here with Anila Angjeli, from the BnF,
French National Library.
And we're going to talk to you about our joint project,
which is about creating a new production tool
for authorities data--
person, corporate bodies, concepts, and so on.
And we spent the last months
asking Wikibase to do this stuff.
So, I will give you some context really quickly,
because it's important for us, as libraries--
There's been this technological shift recently
with the linked open data movement,
and we wanted, as a bibliographical agency,
to follow this new trend.
And, well, it's been years since we've--
experimenting with linked open data,
with RDF, SPARQL and so on.
But we think that now is the good time to move forward.
It's also a good time because there's been a-- not a shift,
there's a fundamental change
in the way we consider bibliographical data.
We used to, and we still have data
stored in records, we call it MARC records
in the library landscape.
We used a specific format called MARC.
But recently, there has been some way
to think about it from another point of view.
And to go from a record-based world, to an entity-based world
when we try to interconnect people, works,
and other entities.
So, in this context, we decided to launch this joint initiative.
But our goal is far beyond libraries.
We would like to have with us
other French GLAMS, for instance,
because we think our project can help them also.
So basically, our project is called *Fichier National d'Entités*,
so National Entity Files.
And it will be a shared platform for collaboratively create
and maintain reference data about entities.
Like I said, persons, corporate bodies, places, concepts,
and creative works.
So, we embrace a lot of things.
And it's a challenge because it's the first time
BnF and Abes collaborate at such a level.
Giving you a quick view about where we are--
where we've come from and where we are now.
We have been working on this project since 2017.
We've benchmarked, other similar initiatives,
and came to the conclusion last year
that there was a strong interest in Wikibase as the FNE's backbone.
We were considering it a good solution
to build upon, but we still had doubts at this time,
because we have specific needs to fulfill.
So we decided to launch, to spend this year
to build a proof of concept with real data
both from BnF catalog, authority catalog, and our catalogs.
And well, try to merge this data into a Wikibase,
and to try to see how they behave
and how the tool can fulfill our needs.
And we were helped in this proof of concept
by Maxime and Vincent from Inventaire.io,
who helped us have a better idea
about what Wikibase can bring us.
And Anila will talk about the first findings.
So, while this decision to go
with experiments with the Wikibase
as the technical infrastructure backbone
or the basic layer for our FNE
was because it's not trivial to move from one system to another,
and because the initiative of using the Wikibase
as the technical infrastructure for our data--
it was both--
means that we move from our classical
system information
or library information system to quite another thing.
And so, we needed to experiment first,
and just to see whether a set of functionalities that are--
that we usually need to perform and fulfill in our environment--
professional environment.
I'm talking here about creating and maintaining,
and not publishing, which is a big difference.
You were at the session, the previous session,
with just Wikidata Commons,
contribution strategies for GLAM--
it was about publication and ways about creation in itself.
So, we need to go step by step,
and that's why we conducted this experiment, this proof of concept.
And, good surprise, no major obstacle to ingest library data
according to a specific ontology, which is, while we--
I briefly mentioned that we put their data in two different flavors of MARC,
then we defined some [inaudible] properties
in order to be able to experiment with merging the data,
and there was no major obstacle from the technical point of view.
Of course, we came up with a confirmation
that Wikibase does offer built-in features
that could be used as the basis for the technical infrastructure for FNE.
But again, the decision is not yet made,
because the experiment is still--
let's say, the developments have been completed.
Now, we're in the phase of writing the final conclusions,
and the decision is not yet made from the strategic point of view,
but these are really the first findings we can talk about.
And Wikibase-- it appears to us
that a Wikibase might be a good operational solution
for managing this initiative-- that is jointly, collaboratively,
create these entity, these things,
to remind you of the opposition, which is things and strings.
However, we noticed there are gaps.
Within the specific needs of our specific institutions,
there are defined communities with their own culture, practices and,
well, it is certain processes that are inherent to the libraries,
and the solution offered by Wikibase, for example, the search.
I mean, from the professional standpoint,
not only from this end-user standpoint,
but professional, we need some indexes
in order to ensure data quality, data curation,
and it is very important for the professional,
and Wikibase with its Elasticsearch
and CirrusSearch doesn't offer.
But still areas of investigation there.
The roles-- how are the roles managed?
The bureaucrat, the patrolling of--
it's not exactly what happened in our world.
Although there is a layer that can be used,
upon which we can build other roles that are more in compliance
with our way of managing the data.
Or different constraints, constraints related to data publication,
or data-- there's an error there we need to correct.
Data policy-- okay, thank you.
So, there are things that need to be--
other layers, bricks, need to be built upon Wikibase.
And of course, one of the reasons, the major reasons,
the reason why we are here with you,
is that we-- we are willing, and we feel the necessity
to be part of a community sharing the same concerns.
And we all know, given the program,
that libraries and GLAMs
are heavily represented in this event.
So, I think-- we think that maybe
in a couple of weeks,
or next year, we will able to communicate more openly
on our decision to go forward with this solution.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
(applause)
So, we will have short presentations first,
and we will all return on stage
for questions, if we have the time for that.
But yeah, we heard something from France.
There's another project.
It's not Fichier National d'Ent--
(jokingly struggles with name)
But it's Gemeinsame Normdatei,
the universal authority file
for the German-speaking world.
And I'm so happy to have good friends of the Wikimedia movement here.
Barbara Fischer and Sarah Hartmann.
Thanks alot for the invitation to talk about our project,
which is called GND meets Wikibase.
And it's a joint project of Wikimedia Deutschland,
and the GND.
And we'd like to give you a quick overview,
as Jens said before, there are just 10 minutes.
Why we go for that approach to evaluate Wikibase,
if it fulfills the requirements for managing authority data
on a collaborative level, I would say.
So, where do we come from, and what's the idea of authority control?
And GND, which stands for Gemeinsame Normdatei,
what's the idea of it?
And yeah, where do we come from, as I said before.
It's not that different from what Anila and Ben said,
just a few seconds ago.
The GND is used for the description of resources,
such as publications, and objects, for example,
and in order to enable accurate data retrieval,
I would say, the GND provides unambiguous and distinct entities
for that retrieval.
And so, there are persistent identifiers, as well, as you all know,
for identification and reference for these entities.
The authority file is used by mainly libraries,
we would say, in the German-speaking countries,
but a few other institutions from the cultural heritage domain,
are using the authority file already.
And all in all there are around about 60 million records,
and in Wikibase, we would say "items,"
which refer to persons, names of persons,
corporate bodies, for example, geographic names, and works.
And the GND is run cooperatively by so-called GND agencies,
and at the moment, there are around about 1,000 institutions
who are active users of the GND-- that means they establish new records
and added records or items on a regular basis.
And the most important thing, I would say,
is that the GND data is provided free of charge
under CC0 conditions,
and that all the APIs and documentation is open as well.
Yeah, talking about open--
that's the point, and the crucial one here--
at the moment, we challenge to open up the GND
for other GLAM institutions and institutions from the science domain.
At the moment, it's really focused on the library sector.
That means that the handy tool of librarians has to evolve
into a tool that is used and accepted across domains.
And that means a lot of work on organizational stuff,
community building, discussions about the current data model,
and infrastructural and technical issues.
And, yeah.
Talking about the infrastructural issues,
we came up with the idea to become partners in crime
with Wikibase, I would say, so have slightly the same aims,
namely make cultural data more accessible and interoperable.
And therefore we now evaluate the software,
which was originally conceived for a sole application, Wikidata,
if it's sufficient for managing authority data.
Right-- hi from my side as well.
We're focusing in our evaluation [inaudible] we do commonly
with Wikimedia Deutschland.
First of all, if Wikibase meets the requirements
of GLAM institutions, galleries, libraries, archives, and museums,
to drive collaboratively an authority file,
which is like our basic question.
We also would like to see Wikibase to increase usability
as the software system we're using right now
is, let's say, quite a complex software
that is not as handy as you might like it to be.
Well, and then, we would like to know
if Wikibase would also ease both data linking
and growing a diverse community.
As Sarah said before, we are right now in a process of opening up
towards a broader scope of GLAM institutions,
and science institutions.
And of course, they are working within their own software structures,
and we would like to know if Wikibase would ease
the cooperation-- collaboration with us.
So, why do we do that?
This is because we consider that Wikibase
might be the attractive community zone,
which means--I had to write that down--
first of all, as it is open source, it will be more accessible
than any proprietary source software system that is used
in the cataloging fields of the GLAM institutions.
Then, we feel that the Wikibase community
already by now is a very dedicated community,
and we would like to participate in that dedicated community,
because we believe that sharing is caring.
What we want to share is our knowledge is your knowledge,
and together, in order to omit redundance,
not by editing the same information over and over again,
but reuse data, link it,
quoting it, and enriching it.
And I placed here on the picture one of the tools
that is broadly spread within Wikidata, this Histropedia,
because we also feel that if we are able to introduce our data into Wikibase,
we might be able to share tools, improving the code,
and thus being an active, contributing part of the community.
Thank you.
I'd like to debate that with you later on.
Thank you so much.
(applause)
Thank you so much.
So, at some point, we ask ourselves, did we--
by accident, write a library software?
Because the adoption of Wikibase in the library fields is so overwhelming.
But there's more to it.
And of course, we didn't accidentally write a library system.
It can be used for other fields as well.
For instance, for biology.
And David Fichtmueller will tell us about using Wikibase
as a platform for biodiversity.
- I think that was grayed. - Yeah.
Full screen? Oh, okay.
Yes. Hello, everybody.
I'm David, and I work at the Botanic Garden,
Botanical Museum here in Berlin.
And I work there as a computer scientist.
We have an entire department called Biodiversity Informatics.
Generally speaking, we write the software
that biologists use in their daily work.
And on my private side,
I've been a Wikipedia contributor for almost 15 years now,
and Wikidata contributor for almost five years now.
And also, as part of my job,
I'm a co-administrator of a MediaWiki farm
with more than 80 wikis regarding the biology community.
And a couple of years ago, I was assigned to a project
that was, yeah, about working on a standard.
In particular, it's a standard called ABCD,
that we needed to do some work on.
And I assume most of you haven't heard about ABCD,
that's not really a bad thing.
It's really specific.
It stands for Access to Biological Collection Data.
And it's an XML schema.
So, it can express biological information,
particular things like information about herbarium sheets,
about collections, like fish in alcohol jars, or--
but also observations--
scientists being out in the field, seeing certain plants,
seeing certain animals.
A lot of variety in here, and because of this,
it's quite a huge standard.
So, we have 1,800 different concepts in there.
That's counting the different XPaths there are within the file.
And so the challenge was to convert this
into a new modern semantic standard.
We wanted to use an OWL ontology
that is able to express the same kind of information
that has previously been expressed with the XML files,
and also keep all the existing documentation,
and restrictions, and all of the connections
between the items
and have a collaborative platform
where other scientists can come in and give us advice
on their specific fields of focus.
Did we model this correctly?
Is there anything missing?
So, yeah, with all of this in mind, we went looking around,
and found a solution, and I guess it wouldn't surprise anybody here,
it's Wikibase, otherwise I wouldn't have been talking here.
So, we decided on using Wikibase.
And we started to install it without the Docker Image.
Big mistake. Don't do this.
(laughter)
In our defense, we started this two and a half years ago.
And it was two years ago at the WikidataCon
that the Docker Image was first released.
So, we had to figure out our own way.
And once we had things up and running,
we didn't really want to break changing things.
We do have the Docker installed for the Query Service,
and we have a weird, hybrid of custom installation
and Docker installation and modified scripts
connecting those two instances.
We then installed QuickStatements, again, manually,
because by that time, it wasn't part of the Query Service,
did some slight modifications, and adjustments to get it to work.
I know it's now part of the Docker Image.
But yeah, we had it running, so, we didn't bother changing it.
Keep this in mind for later on.
But before I go into what we did,
I'm going to avoid a possible confusion here,
because we're talking about data standards,
and when we express things in a semantic way,
we will convert the concepts from the XML into Classes and Properties.
So, this being Object Properties connecting the different classes,
and Datatype Properties that actually contain the content,
that is to store text, numbers, things like that.
And we express all of this within Wikibase,
but all of those are items in Wikibase.
And they are then described using Wikibase Properties.
So, we have ABCD properties being items being described
as Wikibase Properties.
I try to make sure to use the prefixes accordingly,
so you know what I'm talking about when I talk about properties
in this talk.
So, let's look at the properties,
in particular, with Wikibase Properties.
We sat down and thought, "Okay, what do we need
to describe the concepts we want to model?"
And we ended up using around 25 properties
in addition to, of course, *label*, *description*, *alias*.
I'm not going to mention all of them,
just so you see the variety.
Those fulfill our requirements.
And yeah, some things express some restrictions,
and others--
Most of them are optional.
Only very few are mandatory.
So then, we set on importing all of this information.
We wrote a Schema Parser that extracts all of the different concepts.
So everything that has an XPath within the XML Schema,
and all of the documentation that is part of the XML schema,
and so we got this into a nice CSV file,
and then we could work on this and import it using QuickStatements.
Worked quite well.
But then, we had, as I said, 1,800-plus concepts
in our Wikibase instance.
But then, when we had things like person--
person name, and contact email--
those appear a couple of times within the schema--
for the data set owner, for the person who took an image, things like that.
So, of course, we needed to reduce those,
and combine those to reusable classes.
So, there was a lot of manual editing
to reduce the number of concepts,
and in the end, we ended up with a little more than 500.
So, we have Classes, Object Properties, Datatype Properties,
a couple of other ones I'm skipping
to avoid additional complexity here.
And for certain large-scale edits, we also used QuickStatements again.
So now, we did all of the editing,
now we wanted to make sure that the data we have
is actually consistent.
So, that's where we used what we call Maintenance Queries,
used the query interface with some SPARQL queries,
basically to check for missing properties,
wrong links between concepts,
basically, things that didn't match
with our concept, with our structure.
And in the end, we also had to do
a manual review of all of the concepts
just to make sure we didn't miss anything.
This was kind of a lot of work,
because if you only take like five minutes per item,
multiply it by 550,
it's over one week of full and concentrated work.
But of course, we don't need five minutes,
because you sometimes spend like half an hour to fix a certain item
when there's problems with the modeling.
So, we now had all of the data.
Now, it was time to get the data out of Wikibase.
We wrote an export script in Python that uses the Query Service
to get the information about the concepts,
and fill them in templates-- prepared templates.
So, in the end, we get a nice valid OWL file
that contains everything we need.
And this is the actual basis of the standard.
For future versions, when we're going to make revisions,
the Wikibase is our working platform.
And once we do an export, this is the new version of the standard.
Keeping those separate, this would also allow us
to move the server to a different instance,
or as I said, change the installation.
We export JSON for the documentation of the website.
And we also export the data to a second Wikibase instance.
This is like really experimental, right now.
We haven't really used this in production where it can--
where the concepts can then be used to describe actual data.
So we're breaking down those--
we're taking them a step down from properties being Wikibase items,
and converting them into actual Wikibase properties.
This is quite a lot of requests-- quite a lot of steps
to keep all of the data and all of the linking consistent,
but it works.
And in the end, well, it was quite successful.
There is a huge community--
there is a community about Biodiversity Information Standards,
who also had their annual meeting just in the past days.
So, there's a huge interest in reusing this approach
for other standards, as well.
And so, in the future,
we want to try a bit about Shape Expressions--
as I said, we have some restrictions in there to export them--
and build some better workflows for the versioning.
We haven't done this yet.
And switch up the Docker instance.
So, at the end, I'm gong to have a small wish list--
what things could be improved.
Well, there are a lot more tools out there that are really written
for Wikidata, but could be more agnostic,
in particular, QuickStatements.
As I said, I did some adjustments manually.
Many of the issues I had are probably solved by now,
but I don't think all of them.
Then we want to import existing templates,
or the SPARQL template, the Q and the P template.
They are really useful when working with Wikibase.
So, this would be done automatically.
And as I said, we did a lot of manual editing.
So, it would be useful, just ideal to have a tool where you can--
Like in an Excel table--
you load a couple of items, and you load a couple of properties,
and then just jump from cell to cell,
really quickly edit a lot of things
in a semi-automated way.
Thanks. That's the end.
Thank you so much.
(applause)
So much to talk about on this.
So, there is not only-- well, how do I get back from here.
It's not only about science. It's not only about libraries.
You can also create art and beauty with Wikibase.
And who would be better to tell us about this than Stuart Prior.
Now, slightly embarrassingly, we talk about art and beauty,
but this is a really ugly presentation.
(laughter)
Starting off with a room full of Wikimedians,
trains--people like trains.
But it has a purpose.
So, this is Hackney Downs Station in Northeast London.
And this is about Banner Repeater and Wikibase,
which I'll explain further.
So, this is a terrible photo.
But it is actually where an artists' publishing archive is held,
which is on the platform of a train station.
Within there, they've got several hundred copies
of various types of artists' publishing.
They get a lot of public footfall.
It does a lot of outreach to actual general public.
Like you get on the train,
you'll find bits of sort of obscure art on the train.
So, it's a really interesting project,
but part of a much wider community.
So, what is Artists' Publishing? What are Artists' Books?
Like, I didn't know either.
So, the definition, according to Wikipedia,
is "Artists' books are works of art that utilize the form of the book."
Well, you can read it.
But it's individual pieces of art,
or sometimes collections of art, using publishing as a medium.
This varies quite a lot. It's very interesting.
It was kind of--
There was a lot of it in the early '20s and '30s,
and it had a bit of a renaissance, '60s and 70's,
and continues to expand.
Has a large global community, multilingual,
somewhat separate from large institutional art institutions.
So, you'll find collections,
such as the V&A has a collection, obviously.
So, they've got various kind of items such as these.
This is just an article, so it's just not the best display.
But it's a really kind of interesting, yet slightly niche field of work.
But it's not very good on Wikidata.
This is, again, a really terrible photo-- it's not my photo--
of some the stuff held in Banner Repeater's archive.
If you see in the middle, the pink one, *Blast*,
that's actually a fairly notable piece of artists' publishing
from the '20s.
What does it look like on Wikidata?
It's not good on Wikidata.
It's often just confused with books
or other forms of publishing.
The average kind of Wikidata item for
a notable piece of artists' publishing
doesn't really have much to say about it.
You know, it's just-- there you go, that's it.
There's not a huge amount of identifier numbers as well.
So, there's clearly a lot missing
when it comes to artists' publishing,
certainly compared to more traditional forms of art--
paintings and sculpture and so forth.
And there's a huge desire within the community
to start codifying this, and making it a real thing.
So, I'll give you an example of what is actually available.
You can point out what's wrong with this query.
So, this is basically all there is.
That's every artists' book on Wikidata.
So, there's really not a lot.
Some of them don't even have labels for a start.
And it's something that really needs expanding.
And something that has capacity to be expanded.
Has anyone seen what's wrong with this query yet?
The labels-- the labels say "sausage",
because I just stole someone else's query,
and changed the key number.
(laughter)
It's actually a query about sausages.
Anyway, moving on.
But yeah, you see it doesn't really have much of a presence.
We were approached by Banner Repeater.
So, I work with Wikimedia UK.
We were approached by Banner Repeater to help them with this--
with setting up a Wikibase--
in terms of funding, in getting extra funding,
but also in terms of bringing in a wider community,
and being part of the process.
So, the process is basically to gather this community
of artists, archivists, and linked data experts,
and work out what the schema, the data model,
for artists' publishing should be.
It's a very specialized field.
Doesn't really map onto Wikidata perfectly.
It's probably too granular for it.
And the other thing is the kind of flexibility of it.
Maybe it doesn't really fit in Wikidata.
Maybe it's too rigid at the moment.
The Wikibase is being built,
so I haven't got much to show you, because it's not been built yet,
but this more about the process.
And the process is extensive community consultation,
a few kind of layers of it.
So, we're not just going to do this in one session.
It's not a few individuals deciding.
It's kind of ongoing, and ongoing, and ongoing.
The impact of this could be fairly substantial,
because no one else is doing this work.
A lot of the larger institutions have artists' publishing
sitting in their kind of back room.
They don't really know how to categorize it.
They haven't categorized it very well.
They're not very interested in it.
But there is a huge community that is interested in doing this.
So, this is basically the process at the moment.
So, the initial workshop has happened.
So, it was an expert workshop with some people
deep in the field of artists' publishing--
archivists, people who own collections, and so forth--
to establish a kind of basic set of priors,
to look at what things were existing.
The existing status was on Wikidata,
and look at how that could be expanded or improved.
And then they documented that,
and established this basic structure.
And now, we move into the next process
where it's bringing in a much wider community.
So that's-- it's not just data people, it's creators, as well.
There'll be a lot of narrative in this,
and a lot of qualitative things.
Again, stuff that just doesn't really belong on Wikidata.
But also working with archivists,
and working with linked data experts, and so forth,
to hopefully bring this all together,
to create a resource that will have a nice accessible front end,
and also build this community-- people who can contribute to it,
and kind of own this data set.
I'll show you what we've got ready.
This is subject to change.
But this is basically kind of where we've got so far
with the expert ones.
So, you see different P numbers being developed,
and look at what their equivalent on Wikidata is.
And obviously, it's a lot more granular
than probably the information on Wikidata is at the moment, so--
There's a lot of detailed stuff, so there's qualities
such as height, width, thickness, and so forth,
which aren't necessarily that present
on other groups of artists' publishing on Wikidata.
But there's also other things like "commissioned by", and "contributors to",
and a lot of these works will have multiple contributors.
And multiple editions and things like that.
There's really a lot of granular information
that can come about these things.
And a lot of narrative as well, you know,
as things have changed over time,
as people have reinterpreted things.
And this was what was created.
Again, most of it has Wikidata equivalents,
but some of it doesn't yet.
So, what do we have here.
Other editions, and things like that.
So, it's fairly specialized.
This is the first stage.
And this will go through another process,
as people take things away from it or contribute, too.
The flexibility is really important in this.
It's kind of getting away from older kind of standards,
and moving to something which is a bit more up-to-date,
and something where the community can really change things,
and not be dictated to-- and I'll start speaking quicker.
So, power dynamics, at the moment, and why Wikibase.
So at the moment, this is the art world.
This is what the art world looks like.
It's a big orange thing.
But you've got these large institutions,
and then you've got sort of groups of artists' publishing.
That could be Delhi, Mexico City, London, and so forth.
And what we don't want is this kind of thing
where large institutions and experts get to dictate
the kind of ontology, and how these things are going to work.
So, working to establish a Wikibase among an artist community
can help them work out what they're going to do,
and then they start pushing back into the larger institutions,
with a more kind of flexible data model,
with something that's more up-to-date
and coming from grassroots organizations,
as opposed as coming from institutions, so to speak.
So, I think there's huge value in this approach
in terms of creating a sort of parallel infrastructure
for communities of people who own content, and so forth,
much like Wikimedia is,
and kind of pushing out to institutions,
rather than doing it the other way around.
Do I have another slide? What next?
I always put this slide in, because it's always the worst slide,
and it's such a stereotype.
What next? We're moving on to the community consultation stage,
so we'll get a bit more kind of expansive and interesting.
This obviously, this database will be talking to Wikidata,
but on what term, we're not 100% sure.
But it could be that this becomes very--
just a very specific instance for artists' publishing
that Wikidata can draw from, and vice versa.
And I'll just finish off with that picture again,
because I just quite like it.
And that's all I have to say. Thank you.
- Thank you so much. - (applause)
We're almost at the end of our fast-paced ride,
and we'll-- what to say? we saved the best for last?
No, but we give the last presentation
to someone who's a true pioneer of using Wikibase
in the field of digital humanities.
And, yeah-- Olaf Simons.
You have not prepared any slides, but you will do some live action.
Exactly.
And I have been on Wikipedia since 2004, actually.
I have the 15 years.
What am I going to show?
I've been congratulated for this.
I'm going to show you the Wikibase instance we created.
It's not a Docker Image.
And I could agree, it's not the best to have a Docker--
it's not the best to have an independent installation.
It's difficult,
and it has been extremely difficult for us,
and we're grateful for the Wikimedia Germany
to help us get it done on a mutual agreement we had.
So, basically, we have here several projects on this.
It's more project-oriented than Wikidata.
And my thing should be in here.
I open that and go-- just should have done that before.
Here we are.
The history of the Illuminati-- I start with this one.
This has been a little film
which has been created by Paul-Olivier Dehaye,
whom I only know from Twitter,
as he asked us what kind of experience
did we make when we got our Wikibase,
and he was experimenting with his own.
And I talked to him about things we could do,
and things we could not do.
This was a film I would love to be able to do.
And he said, "It's easy for me.
I can run a SPARQL search, get the information,
and put it into a program, in which you can then see this thing."
It's actually 20 years of research on the Illuminati,
and gives you a short history of the entire organization
and all its correspondences.
That's not a Wikimedia tool.
It's not a tool of Wikibase.
But it's something you can do.
And actually, I like it that it is not a tool already.
It should become a tool.
I like it because it shows our data is really free.
Someone can download our data, someone can do something with it,
which we haven't expected, and it can be done within two hours,
if you're bright-- and he is bright, of course.
So, he created this for us.
I go back to my presentation.
Why on Wikibase?
This was the immediate question when we approached Wikimedia.
I knew of Wikidata since 2010,
and in 2017, it was ready to be used by us.
And there was actually an interest from Wikimedia people to say,
"Do it, and we support you."
Why our own base?
Basically, as original research that we have to do.
And the entire installation is a research tool.
It's not only there to take a look at what we did
and for presentation purposes,
but actually, I use it every day for my research.
I change dates of documents,
and take a look at how things look when I have changed that.
I do a lot with working hypothesis.
And we ask projects that have data to give us their data,
and to feed them in,
and they can, again, put a label,
put an item to their data sets,
that says this has been produced by the following project.
Next projects can continue with it.
But it's already there as a marker
that this is a data set with work from a certain project.
And if you have a project, DFG--
DFG funded, the German research institution--
if you have a project, you want to show
what kind of work you have done.
And you can now do a SPARQL search
and present your entire group of data sets
in the final résumé of your work.
So we get original research, we identify research,
we encourage the working hypothesis.
This is a working tool,
and it's actually quite useful to start from the beginning,
not to present something in the end.
But from day one, you work with it,
and what you think is the proper answer to that question,
you can put it into Wikibase, and then
you can substantiate information
until you see this is the right identification
of a person or the right date for a thing
which we haven't been able to date so far.
So, actually, accumulate work while you are doing it,
use the Wikibase as a kind of tool
that is getting you closer to the final result.
Our first meeting took place on December 1, 2017.
And I remember I had a little challenge for you,
and that was a death date-- a date of death for a person--
where I wanted to have someone to show a source for that,
and that was extremely difficult,
because he had to create the source
before he could connect it to that.
And in the room, we were--
we had the clear idea, if we do this, we'd do it
with the sources already part of the Wikibase installation we have.
And if we have the sources in there--
that is, all the early modern books that have been printed
would be the ideal.
If we have that in there, we need the GND in there.
And when we heard that the GND people are on their track to test the software,
I approached them and asked, "Wouldn't you like to do this
in a cooperation with us, so that we can have your data,
which we want to have, anyway,
and that you can see how it works on a Wikibase."
And this is where we are at the moment.
And presently, I would say, a lot of things,
we're not sure how they are done,
or at least I am not sure how they are done.
How's the input done, how do you get from a resource of strings
to an item-based resource-- lots of things.
And basically, my talk here is an invitation.
Join us.
We are still not really part of the Wikibase community.
That doesn't exist.
We have a Wikidata community.
And lots of things are taking place in Wikidata,
but if I ask for help for a Wikibase that is not Wikidata,
that's a difficult thing.
First thing I would say is, actually, to work with us is cool,
because you can grab the data for Wikidata anytime, any moment, at CC0.
So, actually, you can use it as an incubator of your work,
and drag it to Wikidata.
And also, we will work with big data, when we have the GND
in there, that will be quite something.
So, if you really want the challenge,
you can get it also on our platform.
And we offer interesting communities.
Basically, one of the things that is different
is that we have all clear-name accounts and institutions.
So, but that also means you can do things
which you couldn't do on Wikidata.
You can do your genealogy at our site.
We don't mind.
It's interesting to have people getting such data.
You can do your city's search-- research, historical research
on our platform-- we don't mind.
You can be with research on our platform.
So, lots of things need to be done.
We have immense problems running the database.
It was implemented by Wikimedia,
but now, we see lots of things don't really work.
We can't really fix that.
It's extremely difficult to get help
to run the database, to update the database,
to solve little technical problems,
which we face as soon as we run an instance outside Wikidata.
Like getting the direct GND link is difficult.
It works on Wikidata, it doesn't work on our instance.
Getting images from Wikimedia Commons
on our Wikibase is not that easy.
Lots of little things still remain.
So, actually, this is an invitation.
If you want to join us on the mass input, do that.
Approach us.
If you want to help us with technical things,
this is highly welcome.
And then, we need tools.
You saw the tool we had in the beginning.
Actually, it's not that difficult to get such tools.
I saw what kind of query you do to get such a visualization,
and once you have it, you should be able to modify it easily.
These tools are extremely precious
in our community of digital humanities projects.
And there are little companies that create these tools,
again, and again, and again, and get money for that.
I would love to have these tools just once and for all free
and on the market and working with a Wikibase instance.
So, anyone who is interested in developing tools,
approach us, and we have plenty of ideas
of what visualizations historians would love to see,
and that should be done.
So, basically, lots of things, like, still remain.
I've got one minute. I don't need that one minute.
And you're putting pressure on me.
(person) Give it to the audience.
I give the minute to the audience.
Yeah. Thank you so much.
And maybe you want to sit down,
because I would like everyone to join me back on stage.
And we can have a round of questions.
I really like that we ended with an invitation,
because this is what this is now.
You are invited to ask questions.
You are also invited to join us tomorrow at the Wikibase meetup.
If you are-- if you have some idea
for an awesome Wikibase installation,
for your institution, for your hobby, for changing the world--
please come and join us, we will meet up, and--
There's some complication with the chairs.
Well, let's stand up. Okay.
I think we have another microphone, here.
(person) I have the microphone for the questions.
Okay. So--
Thank you for the presenters.
And meet us at the Wikibase meetup,
and now, I can't wait to hear your questions to the panel.
(person) Who's the first?
(person) Hi. I will be talking in the lightning session, too,
about geosciences, and how in geosciences,
there's many data repositories that have collected
and shared data with the community
for years, for decades in some cases.
And they curate the data set, their schemas evolve continuously,
they get a lot of feedback from the community.
All they desire is to organize the community,
to enable the growth of these repositories.
So, they don't necessarily desire to put all their content in Wikidata
and lose control over it.
They offer a tremendous service curating this content.
So, I just wanted to point out that some of the requirements
and needs that have been voiced by the panelists
appear in my communities.
And my question is, how do you mix or maintain control
over those schemas, over the standards,
while allowing the community to continue to introduce feedback
and have more of this crowdsourcing spirit that Wikidata has?
I think everyone could answer that, but maybe David, you want to start?
I'm not sure whether I'm the right person to answer this,
because in our use case--
in terms of data modeling,
it's really a narrow set of people who actually do the work.
We contact experts for the relevant segments,
and some of them could contribute, but for the current iteration,
it was only me and two colleagues who actually worked on it.
So, we want to have this option, that we get experts in,
but it's always in close collaboration with us,
so that we don't really have to worry
about the problem of crowdsourcing.
Being part of the Wikimedia community,
I would say, I would not be that worried.
95% of the edits are good edits, and improving things--more than that.
As soon as we have an instance that is actually closed--
where I offer the accounts on real name,
that's an additional hurdle that no fool is going to go over.
People are required on our instance to offer an address, on page--
not to me, but on page--
and this is something only institutions usually do,
or private people that say,
"Okay, I'm a private person. I love this research.
This is my personal field. I give you my address."
And this is a thing that puts off every--
any vandal who wants to destroy Wikidata.
So, you can close the system, but then,
you are not really part of the same flowing community.
But again, I would say, if you go to CC0,
then you can open up, you can be the incubator
where people do the research, and then it goes out to the community.
But it's an invitation-- use maybe closed works,
and use an instance where you work together with people you like.
Well, I think that--
I don't think that it's only my opinion--
it is there are different perspectives,
and it will be hard to reconcile all perspectives and say,
"Wikidata is the solution for the entire world to go into."
I don't say by this that Wikidata is *not* a solution,
but there are different perspectives, there are different needs.
The world is-- really, there is a large variety of needs,
of professional perspectives, that you cannot reconcile
in a unique worldwide database.
So, I think that both are--
The trickiest thing is how to reconcile
and find angles of dialogue between these two large families
of needs and perspectives.
If there are more questions,
I would rather like to go to more questions.
Anybody else?
If not, meanwhile you're thinking about your questions--
I would just like to say that's one of the reasons
why we consider Wikibase,
because we believe that adding, editing information
within the Wikibase instance, where you have rights and roles,
as you have in Wikidata, gives us the opportunity
to share that information with the information in Wikidata
in a more easy way, a more convenient way
than if we try to build these bridges in between our authority file
and Wikidata at the moment.
(person) So, I find it quite exciting
hearing about how you're energizing communities
to find their own ways for data modeling,
and that you can put into Wikibase.
Will you-- I'm just saying of Stuart Prior's community,
but also some of the others--
be trying to feed the approaches
that as a community that you decide work back to Wikidata,
to say, "We've done artists' books,
we've thrashed through several iterations,
this is what we found really worked,
and the properties that you should have
or revisions you should make to the Wikidata data model.
Good question. Very short answer.
It's an interesting question.
I don't know whether this is a model
that's going to work for other types.
I hope it is.
But it's a difficult one if you question
of whether the Wikidata community accepts the kind of authority
of a separate community that goes off and does the work on its own.
But I would certainly hope
that it's a way of people feeding back into this process,
without necessarily needing to go onto Wikidata and do it.
Well, I would say, grab it.
Grab it if it's convenient, take it, and take a look at how it works
in the other instance.
And if you feel like this is a cool property
to do certain searches, then that will be adopted,
that will be flowing.
I wouldn't think of authorities doing this.
(person) Coming from a Wikidata user perspective,
the great thing you're doing is showing you've established code
that works and runs.
You've established a data model that people can see,
is implementable, and works.
And so, in the open source community,
you know, show us the code.
You can do that.
And that's why I think it's very exciting to have these branches
that can then fold it back for data modeling.
Yeah, thank you.
I think that is exactly the point.
I also like the verb that you used-- energize.
This is exactly what we want to do.
Energize, as in Star Trek.
Yeah, this panel comes to an end.
And if you have any more questions
on all these Wikibase projects, talk.
- Please come tomorrow. - Have conversations.
This is what this conference is about.
Thank you very much.
(applause)