Opening up Belgian Cultural Heritage Reference Data with Wikibase

Sven Lieber 0000-0002-7304-3787 Data manager at the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR), Brussels ( https://ror.org/0105w2p42) Opening up Belgian Cultural Heritage Reference Data with Wikibase Agenda •GLAM* use case MetaBelgica •Decentral vs Central solution •Conclusion and next steps *Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums Opening up Belgian Cultural Heritage Reference Data with Wikibase KBR is the national library of Belgium Opening up Belgian Cultural Heritage Reference Data with Wikibase We currently hold around 8 mio documents that can be consulted in our reading rooms Via legal deposit we roughly receive 35,000 books each year => We have a lot of bibliographic and authority records (linked entities) KBR is one of ten Federal Scientific Institutes (FSIs) Open research data mandate “As open as possible, as closed as necessary” CC0 and CC BY recommended for data created by BELSPO funded research Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy (BIRA-IASB) Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium (KMI-IRM) Royal Observatory of Belgium (KSB-ORB) and the Planetarium Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (KBIN-IRSNB) Royal Museum for Central Africa (KMMA-MRAC) Royal Museums for Art and History (KMKG-MRAH) Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (KMSKB-MRBAB) Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA) Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) State Archives (RA-AE) Belgian Science Policy Office Legal obligations to among other create inventories of the respective collections, share with the public and actively participate in (inter) national research Duplicate data of shared entities leads to problems Duplicate efforts to curate data about entities + efforts for data consumers to integrate and identify/fix inconsistencies Varying quality and correctness of data Decentral vs Central solution Opening up Belgian Cultural Heritage Reference Data with Wikibase Current legacy systems not ready Keep in mind: not just dataset-metadata aggregation, but millions of records with duplicates Shifting data integration burden to users and data hubs A single-point of failure Not solving the issue of duplicate efforts and data Fully decentral Fully central Wikibase reference data system Best of both worlds: loosely coupled FAIR data One-size-fits-all schema pressure Technical and social challenges by replacing existing system Shared entity management - open source and FAIR MetaBelgica Loosely coupled, central deduplicated data: names, birth and death date/place, identifiers Advantages of decentralized and central system + single trustworthy source for users Data integration on producer side (short-term: project until 2026-12, long-term: Wikibase) 930,000 82,000 3,400 7,400 [1] Lieber, S., Lamas, E., Buelinckx, E., Angenon, E., & Van Oene, M. (2025). Deliverable 1.2.2 - Quality requirements and categories of Belgian entities. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14974410 [1] Conclusions Opening up Belgian Cultural Heritage Reference Data with Wikibase Pragmatic and future-oriented Balancing control and collaboration Sustainable authority data management Wikibase is mature (TRL-9), data maintenance is user-friendly and software widely used in similar contexts (Luxembourg, Germany, …) Local autonomy and data protection while providing high quality FAIR reference data Join forces to position Belgium’s cultural heritage on the global stage Next steps Opening up Belgian Cultural Heritage Reference Data with Wikibase Data integration and enrichment Data governance and public interface Ease maintenance of loose coupling Apply tailored strategies depending on metadata quality categories Define clear roles, workflows and develop end-user front-end Automatic or semi-automatic workflows to keep datasets aligned