Connecting Collection and Repertoire Management to Wikidata

Make sure that your metadata is in sync with the world

Last updated on Mar 24, 2023 3 min read

Tools to connect photographs about Béla Bartók collecting songs to the songs he collected and their modern interpretations. As sound recordings, journal articles and books at the same place. Regardless in which country and what type of institution it is catalogued and made available.

We love Wikidata, because we believe in open knowledge, and we believe in linking open data, and Wikidata is the easiest, most open, most accessible way to place information on linked open knowledge graphs.

Linking open data can make songs, films, books, photographs easier to find, to reuse. To connect photographs about Béla Bartók collecting songs to the songs he collected and their modern interpretations. The book of War and Peace with the locations in Leo Tolstoy’s monumental work. And then with other locations that were dubbing in the recent BBC adoption of the book. And connect them with the earlier one, filmed in the former Yugoslavia.

Reprex is seeking partners to connect archive and collection inventories automatically, actively rights-managed music, film, and photography catalogues to link public archive, rights management metadata via Wikidata into a self-correcting metadata system, improving and ensuring that machines find the correct information about European or global cultural content. We want to build an open-source tool to make this process automatic and painless.

The BBC’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s novel, much of which was filmed in Lithuania, sparked sparked huge interest in the country abroad. The series featured Vilnius’ Old Town and major sights in Vilnius including Gediminas Castle, Vilnius University and other areas like Trakų Vokė. More than six million British viewers tuned in for its first episode in January.

Our next product is the development of an open source tool (and an app) that brings your reliable catalogue or collection information to the format of Wikidata. It will show what is already known about your collection or catalogue items “on the internet” and selects information that can be filled or improved, and provides a connection to the mass uploader.

A video tutorial on how to use QuickStatements to bulk upload data onto Wikidata by Dr Sara Thomas, Scotland Programme Coordinator, Wikimedia UK.

Providing a proper data representation to historically underrepresented groups, like women in the example of bulk updating monument data about monumental women by Dr Sara Thomas, or films from small countries, literature from small languages, or niche genre music is essential in the era of AI. Current global platforms for music, film, books, use machine learning that are trained on large open datasets like Wikidata and connecting sources. These automated systems, like automatic recommendations, will not recommend to suitable audiences this diverse content that lower quality or lacking machine-readable metadata representation.

Links

University of Edinburgh Media Hopper Create: How to use QuickStatements - a tool to bulk upload data onto Wikidata by Hannah Rothmann, September 7th, 2020.
Lithuania Tribune: War and Peace tourist trail launches in Vilnius, March 31, 2016.
Wikidata: Linked open data workflow

Connecting Collection and Repertoire Management to Wikidata

Reprex

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