METABELGICA

About the project

This project aims to create a platform in which different Federal Scientific Institutions (FSIs) can collaboratively curate entities related to cultural heritage (such as persons, organisations or locations). Such entities are useful to researchers, library professionals, archives, museums and ultimately anyone on the web interested in Belgian cultural heritage. Currently the rich information on these entities is physically distributed - between numerous FSIs; is modelled in numerous formats, and in multiple languages; resulting in duplicate data and duplicate efforts. The newly built platform will be based on the Wikibase software and integrated into the organisational workflows of the FSIs. Therefore, it will solve the mentioned problems and increase the data quality by providing a single trustworthy data source of Belgian entities following the FAIR principles which can be consumed both by humans and machines.

The data collected by the four FSI partners of this project: KBR (Royal Library of Belgium), MRBAB-KMSKB (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium), IRPA-KIK (Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage) and MRAH-KMKG (Royal Museums of Art and History) will be placed under an open licence for wide reuse (following the BELSPO Open Data directive ‘as open as possible and as close as necessary’). This provides access for all researchers to a unique validated dataset and has thus an impactful potential on the (inter)national scientific community and on the society. Internally, the new platform will create synergies between the participating FSIs.

Within this project we will survey stakeholders to identify their needs and use a state-of-the-art iterative methodology to integrate existing entity data of the FSIs. Furthermore, we will set up the Wikibase infrastructure which will serve as an entity management system for the integrated data.

In the short-term MetaBelgica will provide several tangible outcomes:

● A common RDF-based data model aligned with international standards as well as taxonomies which can be embedded in the Belgian Interoperability Framework,

● Several reports and statistics of existing Belgian authority data used by the different FSIs,

● Integrated and enriched high-quality data of Belgian entities which is ready to be used by FSIs and shared with the public. Researchers, libraries, cultural heritage organisations, musea, will be able to rely on these persistently identifiable entities to manage their collections and research output and make them more easily discoverable on the web.

In the long-term MetaBelgica will also provide organisational recommendations and technical components to enable a sustainable collaboratively editable shared entity management system.

IDLab role

To develop a shared Linked Data platform for managing shared entities of the FSI’s. The platform, based on Wikibase (the technology behind Wikidata), aims to ensure FAIR data about persons, organisations, time/events and locations related to Belgian cultural heritage. We will integrate data about millions of Belgian entities from the four participating FSIs into a Wikibase instance and make it accessible by using Persistent Identifers. This will not only professionalize our own data management and improve data quality, but according to received project support letters, also impact other regional, national and European institutions.