An International Knowledge Base for all Heritage Institutions (Part 1*) – SocietyByte

"Heritage institutions are places in which works of art, historical records, and other objects of cultural or scientific interest are sheltered and made accessible to the public. The equivalent of that in the digital world, is already taking shape, through digitization and sharing of digital-born or digitized objects on online platforms. In this article we shed light on how the issue of structured data about heritage institutions is being tackled by Wikipedia, and its sister Wikidata, through their “Sum of All GLAM” project.^[1].

Access to these objects, and information about them, is provided and mediated both through platforms maintained by the heritage sector itself and through more general-purpose platforms, which often serve as a first point of entry for the wider public. These platforms include Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia, which also happen to be among the most visited websites on the Web. In this emerging data and platform ecosystem, Wikipedia and related Wikimedia projects play a special role as they are community-driven, non-profit endeavours. Moreover, these projects are working hard to make data and information available in a free, connected and structured manner, for anybody to re-use.

There are various layers of information about heritage institutions, ranging from descriptions of institutions themselves and descriptions of their collections, to descriptions of individual items. There may be digital representations of these items, and in some cases even searchable content within the items. Figure 1 illustrates how the top four layers of data and information are currently addressed in Wikipedia, with Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons increasingly focussing on providing structured and linked data alongside the unstructured or semi-structured encyclopaedic information contained in Wikipedia articles...."