Wikidata Visualization for Event and Temporal Data Exploration in Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage

Go Sugimoto; Victor de Boer; Jacco van Ossenbruggen

doi:10.1177/22104968251395606

Wikidata Visualization for Event and Temporal Data Exploration in Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage

Go Sugimoto^*
, Victor de Boer
, Jacco van Ossenbruggen

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

Temporal data are crucial in many research activities within Digital Humanities (DH) and Cultural Heritage (CH). At the same time, there is a growing need for visualization tools to explore events in Linked Data (LD). This article investigates LD visualization tools that address event data in association with temporal data for research purposes in DH and CH. We analyze the availability of Wikidata visualization tools capable of handling event data for DH and CH research and propose ways to improve visualization tools to better represent temporal data in Wikidata. We identified 14 requirements based on principles from the information visualization domain, as well as an analysis of previous studies and existing tools. We design and develop a Wikidata-centric tool to meet these requirements. This tool is then evaluated through focus groups and questionnaires with DH and CH experts. The results of the evaluation show overall positive feedback and highlight the implicit need and value of visualization tools that handle events in Wikidata for research in DH and CH. In addition, they indicate the improved accessibility and visualization capabilities of Wikidata through the seven time-related functionalities of the tool.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	1-22
Number of pages	22
Journal	Semantic Web
Volume	17
Issue number	1
Early online date	11 Dec 2025
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1177/22104968251395606
Publication status	Published - Jan 2026

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2025. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

Keywords

cultural heritage
digital humanities
event data
linked data
user evaluation
visualization tool
Wikidata

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10.1177/22104968251395606Licence: CC BY

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title = "Wikidata Visualization for Event and Temporal Data Exploration in Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage",

abstract = "Temporal data are crucial in many research activities within Digital Humanities (DH) and Cultural Heritage (CH). At the same time, there is a growing need for visualization tools to explore events in Linked Data (LD). This article investigates LD visualization tools that address event data in association with temporal data for research purposes in DH and CH. We analyze the availability of Wikidata visualization tools capable of handling event data for DH and CH research and propose ways to improve visualization tools to better represent temporal data in Wikidata. We identified 14 requirements based on principles from the information visualization domain, as well as an analysis of previous studies and existing tools. We design and develop a Wikidata-centric tool to meet these requirements. This tool is then evaluated through focus groups and questionnaires with DH and CH experts. The results of the evaluation show overall positive feedback and highlight the implicit need and value of visualization tools that handle events in Wikidata for research in DH and CH. In addition, they indicate the improved accessibility and visualization capabilities of Wikidata through the seven time-related functionalities of the tool.",

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N2 - Temporal data are crucial in many research activities within Digital Humanities (DH) and Cultural Heritage (CH). At the same time, there is a growing need for visualization tools to explore events in Linked Data (LD). This article investigates LD visualization tools that address event data in association with temporal data for research purposes in DH and CH. We analyze the availability of Wikidata visualization tools capable of handling event data for DH and CH research and propose ways to improve visualization tools to better represent temporal data in Wikidata. We identified 14 requirements based on principles from the information visualization domain, as well as an analysis of previous studies and existing tools. We design and develop a Wikidata-centric tool to meet these requirements. This tool is then evaluated through focus groups and questionnaires with DH and CH experts. The results of the evaluation show overall positive feedback and highlight the implicit need and value of visualization tools that handle events in Wikidata for research in DH and CH. In addition, they indicate the improved accessibility and visualization capabilities of Wikidata through the seven time-related functionalities of the tool.

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Wikidata Visualization for Event and Temporal Data Exploration in Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage

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