Abstract
The Open Science Lab at Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) uses Wikidata, and the underlying open-source software Wikibase, for reconciliation and data enrichment across diverse linked open data projects in the humanities and cultural heritage sector. In the context of the Consortium for Cultural Heritage part of the National Infrastructure for Research Data in Germany (NFDI4Culture), TIB develops the dedicated Wikibase4Research service in close collaboration with researchers and museum and library professionals. This paper outlines our hands-on approach towards data reconciliation and enrichment workflows using the Wikibase4Research service, and related tooling ecosystem, including the open source OpenRefine reconciliation service, Wikidata’s SPARQL query service and Wikibase extensions. We discuss the outcomes of data enrichment and federation across three architectural datasets structured in separate Wikibase repositories. We elaborate on the advantages of integrating Wikidata data in humanities projects, such as its breadth of cross-disciplinary data, mappings to authority file identifiers, and access to additional data such as images, geo coordinates, historical dates, and more. We also address typical workflow challenges, such as duplicate data entries, missing data, multiple possible matches, as well as the potential for automation of manual tasks. Lastly, the paper also showcases the capabilities of federated queries and their relevance to different research scenarios.