Royal Library of Belgium

Sven Lieber

Hi everyone,

as promised, today you will hear more about the research data
infrastructure conference where I and around **680 other people**
attended last week in Karlsruhe, Germany. Grab a cup of coffee of tea
and enjoy today's edition!

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📅 Why do we need research data infrastructure and how important is the
social component and the humans? I have been to the **1st Conference on
Research Data Infrastructure**. Read more about it in today's event
section.

🔍 Did you know that the software behind the large Knowledge Base
Wikidata is open source? Setting it up is rather technical, but the
Wikibase cloud is one web service that wants to help you with that. In
today's *insights* category I show you how you can **discover existing
Wikibase instances**.

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# 📅 Events: CoRDI conference {#events-cordi-conference}

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For many tasks in our daily lives we use data and services from the web.
You would expect nothing less as a researcher. Yet, providing data and
services relies on good data management, reliable research data
infrastructure and various communities.

Last week I've been to the [1st Conference on Research Data
Infrastructure](https://www.nfdi.de/cordi-2023/?lang=en) (CoRDI)
([Q120753666](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q120753666)), and so have
around 680 people!

**My main takeaways**

- It's mostly about human problems that need to be fixed (connecting
  communities, data governance, etc)

- Knowledge Graphs and especially Wikibase gain attention in the context
  of research (data) infrastructures

- There is an increasing need for sustainably funded data management
  careers

I have had a lot of interesting chats, have seen inspiring keynotes and
exciting presentations. Grab a cup of coffee and tea and check out my
conference trip blog post.

[Read my full CoRDI blog
post](https://sven-lieber.org/en/2023/09/17/cordi-2023/){.button
.primary}

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# 🔍 Insights: Explore the Wikibase cloud {#insights-explore-the-wikibase-cloud}

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Contributing knowledge to the big hub Wikidata is not always the most
suitable solution for some use cases. What if you need your own specific
data model or if you don't want that others change your data?

One way to get started with your own Wikidata is setting up a Wikibase
instance ([Q16354758](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q16354758)). This
rather technical process is offered by the Wikibase cloud
([Q109377403](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q109377403)). Since recently
you can browse existing instances of the cloud to find valuable data for
your use case! I already had a look and there are many interesting
instances out there, some from well known initiatives.

[Discover Wikibase
instances](https://www.wikibase.cloud/discovery){.button .primary}

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That's it for this week of the FAIR Data Digest. I hope you found the
content interesting. Don't forget to share or subscribe. See you next
week!

Sven

[Share FAIR Data
Digest](https://fairdata.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&action=share){.button
.primary}


Hi everyone,  as promised, today you will hear more about the research data infrastructure conference where I and around
<strong>
 680 other people
</strong>
attended last week in Karlsruhe, Germany. Grab a cup of coffee of tea and enjoy today’s edition!

FAIR Data Digest #16

Hi everyone,

greetings from Karlsruhe in Germany where I am attending a conference
about research data infrastructure at the moment. More on it probably
next week ;-) For this week already a warm up, I will talk about our
contribution to this conference, the
**[MetaBelgica](https://www.kbr.be/en/projects/metabelgica/)** project
(I talked about earlier at [FAIR Data Digest
\#5](https://fair-data-digest.org/archive/5)).

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# 🔍 Insights: The research data infrastructure MetaBelgica {#insights-the-research-data-infrastructure-metabelgica}

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If I ask you to get data about a specific book, you might go to the
national library. If I ask about a specific painting you go to the
museum that has it. This is more or less straightforward, usually the
library wouldn't have (possibly contradicting) data about the painting
from the museum.

However, for metadata related to persons, organizations, locations and
events this is another story. The library will have data about the
author of books. And if one of those author happens to be a painter, the
museum will have data about that painter too! Those institutions not
necessarily talk to each other, meaning that curators of both
institutions create the same data twice. Hopefully it is the exact same
data, otherwise, who to trust if one information is different in both
data sources?

This is were the MetaBelgica project
([Q119717964](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q119717964)) comes in!
Currently there is no single trustworthy data source about persons,
organizations, time/events and locations (entities) related to Belgian
Cultural Heritage. Sure, some foreign institutions might have data, and
some local Belgian institutions too. But if they are not properly linked
this is a problem. In a best case scenario they both at least point to a
platform such as Wikidata. But then Wikidata becomes the source of
truth, which actually is not what it is meant or want to be. There
should always be references to claims made on Wikidata.

::: {.captioned-image-container}
<figure>
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href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2ab7797a-1f26-45a3-adc3-112ffe2efca1_1016x557.png"
class="image-link is-viewable-img image2" target="_blank"
data-component-name="Image2ToDOM"></a>
<div class="image2-inset">
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<img
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class="lucide lucide-maximize2" />
</div>
</div>
<figcaption>Whereas collection-related metadata is unique for each
partnering institution, entities are shared which leads to
problems.</figcaption>
</figure>
:::

The Royal Library of Belgium (my employer) is one out of ten *Federal
Scientific Institutes (FSIs)* in Belgium. Five of those are related to
Cultural Heritage. And the following four are joining forces in the
MetaBelgica project: *The Royal Library*
([Q107329675](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q107329675)), the *Royal
Institute for Cultural Heritage*
([Q2235462](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2235462)), the *Royal Museums
of Fine Arts* ([Q377500](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q377500)), and
the *Royal Museums of Art and History*
([Q945059](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q945059)). We talking about
millions of Belgian entities that we want to combine.

Hence we want to solve this problem on a national level in the federated
state of Belgium. We want to combine the data of the majority of Belgian
Federal Scientific Institutes active in the Cultural Heritage domain.
This sounds easy, but actually is a lot of work. On the one hand, a lot
of (possibly poor quality) data needs to be integrated. On the other
hand, those are different institutions with which use different tools
and data standards and follow different cataloging rules.

Roughly there are two challenges to solve: integrating the data in the
first place using an interoperable data model, and govern and curate the
data in a shared entity management system. For the integration we rely
on Linked Data techniques and our experiences from the
[BELTRANS](https://www.kbr.be/en/projects/beltrans/) project
([Q114789456](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q114789456)). Related to the
platform, we haven chosen to use Wikibase
([Q16354758](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q16354758)), the open source
software behind Wikidata. That software enables curators of the
different institutions to manage the data without technical skills like
programming.

Next to providing FAIR data, our goal is the **longevity of the
platform**. Therefore we would like to include the operation of the
platform into the daily cataloging tasks of the partnering institutions.
This means that during the project we have to study the status-quo and
develop both organizational and technical solutions on how we can manage
our data together.

Curious? Check out the link below to find the presentation that I will
give today at the [1st Conference On Research Data
Infrastructure](https://www.nfdi.de/cordi-2023/?lang=en) (CoRDI)
([Q120753666](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q120753666)). Here is also a
link to the proceedings including our submitted abstract ([DOI:
10.52825/cordi.v1i](https://doi.org/10.52825/cordi.v1i)).

[View the presentation
slides](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8337301){.button .primary}

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That's it for this week of the FAIR Data Digest. I hope you found the
content interesting. Don't forget to share or subscribe. See you next
week!

Sven

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Hi everyone,  greetings from Karlsruhe in Germany where I am attending a conference about research data infrastructure at the moment.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

FAIR Data Digest #16

FAIR Data Digest #15