For this information to be as useful as possible, we have to link it to semantically rich and multilingual resources.

Europeana creates an expanding network of cultural heritage resources by linking Europeana objects with open datasets available online. For this information to be as useful as possible, we have to link it to semantically rich and multilingual resources. The Wikidata platform can make the connection between authoritative datasets and crowdsourced data. And it is now part of our knowledge graph - the Europeana Entity Collection.

In a new case study, Get your vocabularies in Wikidata...so Europeana and others can use them, we describe the practical steps data providers can take to upload and align their vocabularies with Wikidata, so that we can access the links and integrate the data into Europeana. This case is based on the recent experiment by Sandra Fauconnier, from the Wikimedia Foundation, on aligning the MIMO vocabulary for musical instruments with Wikidata.

Samaritaans Alphabêt, Salomons Alphabêt en Oud Caldeesch Alphabêt, Rijksmuseum, Public Domain

So far, when deciding which sources to link to, we have selected large, rather generic and multilingual data sources and favoured ones that are well-connected, that is, those which indicate equivalent elements in other vocabularies. However besides our ’centralized’ enrichment, Europeana would also benefit from some of the more ‘local’ semantic resources used by our data partners, which are often the result of tremendous data curation efforts. And so we are encouraging our data partners to add these resources to Wikidata.

Wikidata (and the Structured data project) provides great opportunities for the GLAM community to share its local resources on the Web for third parties like Europeana to get access to rich and multilingual descriptions, and for Wikidata to enrich its existing knowledge base with authoritative data.

If you are interested in this topic, support our proposal for the Wikidata conference next October in Berlin!