Technical Usability of Wikidata’s Linked Data: Evaluation of Machine Interoperability and Data Interpretability

Nuno Freire*, Antoine Isaac

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book / Report / Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Wikidata is an outstanding data source with potential application in many scenarios. Wikidata provides its data openly in RDF. Our study aims to evaluate the usability of Wikidata as a data source for robots operating on the web of data, according to specifications and practices of linked data, the Semantic Web and ontology reasoning. We evaluated from the perspective of two use cases of data crawling robots, which are guided by our general motivation to acquire richer data for Europeana, a data aggregator from the Cultural Heritage domain. The first use case regards general data consumption applications based on RDF, RDF-Schema, OWL, SKOS and linked data. The second case regards applications that explore semantics relying on Schema.org and SKOS. We conclude that a human operator must assist linked data applications to interpret Wikidata’s RDF because of the choices that were taken at Wikidata in the definition of its expression in RDF. The semantics of the RDF output from Wikidata is “locked-in” by the usage of Wikidata’s own ontology, resulting in the need for human intervention. Wikidata is only a few steps away from high quality machine interpretation, however. It contains extensive alignment data to RDF, RDFS, OWL, SKOS and Schema.org, but a machine interpretation of those alignments can only be done if some essential Wikidata alignment properties are known.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationBusiness Information Systems Workshops
Subtitle of host publicationBIS 2019, International Workshops, Seville, Spain, June 26–28, 2019, Revised Papers
EditorsWitold Abramowicz, Rafael Corchuelo
PublisherSpringer
Pages556-567
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)978-3030366919
ISBN (Print)9783030366902
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019
Event22nd International Conference on Business Information Systems, BIS 2019 - Seville, Spain
Duration: 26 Jun 201928 Jun 2019

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Business Information Processing
Volume373 LNBIP
ISSN (Print)1865-1348
ISSN (Electronic)1865-1356

Conference

Conference22nd International Conference on Business Information Systems, BIS 2019
Country/TerritorySpain
CitySeville
Period26/06/1928/06/19

Keywords

  • OWL
  • RDF
  • RDFS
  • Schema.org
  • Semantic Web

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