Encoding Data Models as Wikidata Schemas

Innovation Showcase
Katherine Thornton,  Anne Chen,  Kenneth Seals Nutt  

Dura-Europos Stories is a web application leveraging a presentation framework powered by linked open data for digital storytelling. The framework emphasizes the display of interactive multimedia content, in this case related to archaeological excavations from Dura-Europos, an ancient site in present-day Syria. We introduce a set of schemas in the Shape Expressions (ShEx) language published in Wikidata’s schema namespace that we use in the context of WikiProject IDEA. WikiProject IDEA is a group of Wikidata editors who curate data related to Dura-Europos. This data is then reused within the Dura-Europos Stories site to automatically curate visualizations describing each artifact and location. Members of the WikiProject use ShEx schemas to encode data models that the group has created for items they maintain in Wikidata. They share these schemas on the pages of their WikiProject, and track the updates to the schemas in Wikidata’s schema namespace. These schemas are both human-readable and machine-readable, and can be used to validate entity data from Wikidata. Schema-based validation provides editors with a way to monitor data from the knowledge base relevant to their project, and allows non-technical curators a way to develop virtual viewing guides without needing to read or write code.