DCAT-AP for Wikibase and Wikidata
| Reference number | |
| Coordinator | WIKIMEDIA SVERIGE |
| Funding from Vinnova | SEK 110 000 |
| Project duration | October 2014 - August 2015 |
| Status | Completed |
Purpose and goal
The aim of the project was to make it possible to use DCAT-AP to describe Wikidata and make the process general enough to also be able applied to other platforms using Wikibase. We feel that this goal has been reached since there is now a DCAT-AP description for Wikidata. This has been integrated so as to be automatically generated after each update. The software can also be reused in any future Wikibase-installation. Finally the solution is fully localisable so that the DCAT-AP information can be had in any desired language.
Results and expected effects
We believe that the DCAT-AP description of Wikidata will see increased use as more translations are put into production (there are already translations in 20 languages). The flexible way in which the DCAT-AP description is generated also makes it likely that the coming CommonsData project, linked data in support of the 27 million media files on Wikimedia Commons, will be described using DCAT-AP. Since the module is described on wikiba.se it is also likely that smaller projects which use Wikibase will find it and make use of this solution for generating a multilingual DCAT-AP description.
Approach and implementation
The project started by making an inventory of the available datasets related to Wikidata followed by an analysis of how a project of Wikidata´s nature was best described in DCAT-AP and which parts were generic for any Wikibase installation. The solution was built in as flexible a way as possible to make it easy to reuse in different environments with different conditions/settings, a requirement for deployment on Wikidata. The code went through an extended period of iterative code review so that the various stakeholders within WMF/Wikidata could weigh in on the final result.