What are Wikidata and Wikibase?

Do you know the story of the word “Wiki” behind Wikidata and Wikibase? It is an Hawaian word that means "QUICK!”. Wiki-Wiki! was what the inventor of the first Wiki-system repeatedly heard on a trip to Hawaii. Wiki systems allow for the structure of content to emerge from the bottom of community effort without prescribing one upfront. Semantic data models generation and curation made “Wiki”, is what SEMIC intends to promote, providing support for models surfacing from community driven effort.  In SEMIC terms, the Wiki approach is complementary to that of data models being designed by a small team of selected experts.     

Wikidata and Wikibase are the tools SEMIC has chosen to enable collaboration in creating semantic data models. Hence, If you are running a project intended to publish content powered by a knowledge graph (see EU Knowledge Graph), then the Wikibase platform is a swiss-army kind of tool at your disposal. SEMIC will host for you an installation of Wikibase for your community to start creating a semantic data model collaboratively, and let Wikibase take care of the publication part. Wikibase installations can connect into a network of published semantic data, that is the way SEMIC ensures reconsolidation of community effort, and increased interoperability among the wiki adopters.

Ways you can get started with Wikibase and Wikidata

• Learn about Wikibase and Semantic MediaWiki for data-driven semantics
• Kohesio Project: the initiator of using wikibase for reconciling semantic data models at European level
• EU Knowledge Graph: one of the result out of the Kohesio project

SEMIC has planned a series of webinars and workshops that are very much hands-on! We recommend you tune in and attend, there is a lot to learn:

• Webinar on providing sustainable data services through Wikibase and Wikidata
• Workshop on community-driven data spaces: a hands-on workshop on modeling your content & data
• First hands-on workshops on Wikidata & Wikibase
• Second hands-on workshops on Wikidata & Wikibase
• Third hands-on workshops on Wikidata & Wikibase 

If at this point you have questions on how to get involved, Max De WILDE will be happy to help you.