Wikidata is an outstanding data source with potential application in many scenarios. Wikidata provides its data openly in RDF. This study aims to evaluate the usability of Wikidata as a data source for robots operating on the web of data, according to specifications and practices of linked data, the Semantic Web and ontology reasoning.
The paper evaluates from the perspective of two use cases of data crawling robots, which are guided by our general motivation to acquire richer data for Europeana, a data aggregator from the Cultural Heritage domain. The first use case regards general data consumption applications based on RDF, RDF-Schema, OWL, SKOS and linked data. The second case regards applications that explore semantics relying on Schema.org and SKOS. This work concludes that a human operator must assist linked data applications to interpret Wikidata’s RDF because of the choices that were taken at Wikidata in the definition of its expression in RDF. The semantics of the RDF output from Wikidata is “locked-in” by the usage of Wikidata’s own ontology, resulting in the need for human intervention. Wikidata is only a few steps away from high quality machine interpretation, however. It contains extensive alignment data to RDF, RDFS, OWL, SKOS and Schema.org, but a machine interpretation of those alignments can only be done if some essential Wikidata alignment properties are known.
More information you can find in the QOD 2019 publication:
Freire N., Isaac A. (2019) Technical Usability of Wikidata’s Linked Data. In: Abramowicz W., Corchuelo R. (eds) Business Information Systems Workshops. BIS 2019. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 373. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36691-9_47
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