Building a Knowledge Graph for the History of Vienna with Semantic MediaWiki

Abstract

While research on semantic wikis is declining, Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) can still play an important role in the emerging field of knowledge graph curation. The Vienna History Wiki, a large knowledge base curated by the city government in collaboration with other institutions and the general public, provides an ideal use case for demonstrating strengths and weaknesses of SMW as well as discussing the challenges of co-curation in a cultural heritage setting. This paper describes processes like collaborative editing, interlinking unique identifiers on the web, sharing data with Wikidata, making use of Schema.org, and other ontologies. It presents insights from a user survey, access statistics, and a knowledge graph analysis. This work contributes to the scarce research in wiki usage outside of the Wikipedia ecosystem as well as to the field of community-based knowledge graph curation. The availability of a now significantly improved RDF representation indicates future directions for research and practice.