1. Wikidata as a digital preservation knowledgebase
PresQT workshop, Notre Dame
5/1/17
Euan Cochrane
Yale University Library

2. 10 second overview What is Wikidata?
Why use it for digital preservation data?
What we’re doing
Next steps/how to get involved?

3. ells out "wiki" in morse code

4. Wikidata is: Machine-readable linked open data
Editable by anyone with Internet access
Designed to support both human and algorithmic
curation
A fully-versioned wiki

5. Wikidata has*: over 16,000 active editors over 26 million items
more than 200 bots
*2016

6. Anatomy of a Wikidata item

7. Wikidata as a digital preservation knowledgebase: Why?

8. Why: Automating associating preserved emulatable software environments with content

9. Why?
We want all software preserved (to enable long term access to content)
We want to document software environments (disk images with software installed on them that run on emulators or virtual machines)
We want to document relationships between software, hardware, file formats, code, data, configured environments and unstructured data about them
We want to share the data
We want to enable collaboration

10. Why: Aggregating data from across different technical registries
PRONOM – The National Archives (UK)
Wikipedia/Wikidata
Emulation Services
Library of Congress File Formats
“File”
Mimetypes

11. A view of the structured data about Debian as seen through the Reasonator Tool

12. A view of the structured data about Adobe Acrobat as seen through the Reasonator Tool

13. Questions We Can Ask
Return the names of all applications for which there is a PRONOM identifier in Wikidata
Figure: code for the SPARQL query,

14. Questions We Can Ask
Return the names of all file formats for which there is a PRONOM identifierin Wikidata
Figure: code for the SPARQL query,

15. Questions We Can Ask
Return a list of all items for which there is a Library of Congress Format ID
Figure: code for the SPARQL query,

16. Questions We Can Ask
What scientific software is documented in Wikidata?

17. Dedicated Digital Preservation Portal
A digital preservation “view” on Wikidata
Add, edit, view and report on digital preservation data in Wikidata
GUI for managing trusted sources

18. Challenges Trust: Scale Data modelling/different opinions
Trusted editors, endorsed edits
Scale
Data modelling/different opinions
Localized vs. shared data
Wikidata maturity

19. Next Steps/Getting involved
Join the Google Group: preservation
Take a look at sample queries etc:
Start editing & using Wikidata
Thank you!
Euan Cochrane