2025-10-31 –, One and Only
Wikibase is often seen as a tool for semantic and technical interoperability. But the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) reminds us that digital public services — from GLAM to statistical infrastructures — require alignment on four layers: legal, organisational, semantic, and technical. Our experience shows that while the semantic and technical layers are well developed in the Wikibase/Wikidata ecosystem, the legal and organisational layers are decisive if we want true federation and co-curation across institutions and communities.
This presentation introduces three diverse Wikibase-based Data Sharing Spaces (DSSs): the Slovak Comprehensive Music Database, the Finno-Ugric DSS, and TextileBase. These cases demonstrate two distinctive curatorial challenges:
- Finno-Ugric DSS: reconnecting dispersed minority heritage across several countries and languages, where community epistemologies must be reconciled with institutional metadata.
- Slovak Comprehensive Music Database: cutting across unusually complex public/private boundaries, where rights agencies, libraries, and the National Library operate under very different data governance regimes.
By combining Wikibase with pragmatic legal and organisational design, these DSSs achieve the kind of federation that European policy papers and digital heritage scholarship often describe but rarely realise. We will also share our conceptual multilingual Wikimuseum exhibition, co-curated with Wikimedia Eesti and several museums and to be presented at Wikimedia CEE 2025, as a live example of how dispersed collections can be federated into a co-curated digital service.
Description
Across European initiatives — the European Cultural Heritage Cloud, the Data Spaces Support Centre, the Big Data Value Association, Gaia-X — federation is a recurring promise. Yet in practice, true data federation rarely happens. Most linked open data we encounter is shallow, siloed, or not interoperable across institutions.
This is where Wikibase and Wikidata have a unique strength. They combine solid semantic/technical infrastructure with established governance and community workflows that make them usable well beyond specialist circles. Many services already rely on Wikidata’s semantic backbone; Wikibase is deployed across GLAM, research, and community projects.
A frequent critique is that the Wikibase Data Model is “too simple” compared to event-based ontologies like CIDOC-CRM, RiC, DCTERMS, or FRBRoo. But our empirical experience shows that those richer models are rarely federated in practice, and almost never tested on the legal and organisational layers of interoperability. Outside of large national libraries or flagship museums, uptake is limited. If the goal is real federation — reaching smaller museums, city libraries, private collections, or rights agencies — then the pragmatic simplification built into Wikibase is an advantage, not a flaw.
Two of our case studies illustrate the distinctive curatorial challenges we face:
- Finno-Ugric DSS: reconnecting dispersed minority heritage across Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Hungary, and Germany, where community epistemologies must be reconciled with institutional metadata traditions.
- Slovak Comprehensive Music Database: bridging unusually complex public/private boundaries, where rights agencies, libraries, and the National Library of Slovakia all operate under different governance and data protection regimes.
By contrast with stalled or purely theoretical initiatives, Wikibase offers:
- Semantic flexibility: intuitive pattern-matching that aligns with richer ontologies where useful.
- Workflow-level solutions: plugins and extensions for reconciliation, multilingual labelling, authority control.
- Governance at scale: quasi-standardisation through Wikidata, with community-tested practices for attribution, provenance, and reuse.
We will conclude by presenting our co-curated Wikimuseum exhibition, built from digital surrogates of dispersed museum collections and developed with Wikimedia Eesti, to be shown at Wikimedia CEE 2025. It demonstrates how federation becomes tangible: from fragmented heritage to a multilingual, participatory exhibition.
Our message is that Wikibase/Wikidata are not just technically competent, but infrastructurally unique: they enable the kind of legal–organisational federation that European policy envisions but that few others have delivered in practice.
Daniel Antal is an economist and data scientist working on the data problems of increasingly autonomous systems in the music and film industries. He has been active on Wikipedia for 20 years, is a heavy user of Wikidata, Commons, and Wikibase, and has been writing code since childhood. He is the founder of Reprex, a Dutch trustworthy AI startup focused on data curation, a Fellow at the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Information Law, and Work Package leader for data infrastructure in the Open Music Europe consortium.