Linking ACMI to Wikidata
As part of Wikimedia Australia’s Partner Projects, ACMI has hosted Paul Duchesne as their Wikimedian in Residence to link ACMI's catalogue items to Wikidata.
ACMI is Australia's national museum of screen culture with over 200,000 items in their collection including film, ephemera, objects, and videogames.
Every item in their collection has an ACMI Identifier and unique URL that can be used in Wikidata to link back to ACMI's website.
Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. Its open data can be used by anyone under the CC0 public domain license, so ACMI can add to and take information from Wikidata to improve both datasets.
As part of this residency project, ACMI hired Paul Duchesne to explore ways this can be achieved.
He began by taking all of the ACMI Identifiers for creators listed in ACMI's catalogue and trying to find their match in Wikidata.
This was done by matching filmographies, and was fairly easy to find matches for well known creators or those with large filmographies.
But ACMI also includes smaller films in their collection that might not appear anywhere else, so these can be added to Wikidata as new items, and so far over 12,000 new items have been added to Wikidata that all link back to ACMI's catalogue.
Paul has previously published work on using Wikidata with film archives. In the paper Cataloguing Practices in the Age of Linked Open Data: Wikidata and Wikibase for Film Archives he and Adelheid Heftberger shared how film archives could use Wikidata to pull filmographic information from Wikidata and publishing their datasets on Wikidata themselves.
For his work at ACMI, Paul has shared Notebooks on Github on integration between ACMI and Wiki resources.
Once the project is complete, Paul will publish further documentation on his work, and more information about the residency will be shared soon on the ACMI Labs blog.
External links
- ACMI website
- ACMI Labs blog
- Linking ACMI to Wikidata, Paul Duchesne on medium
- ACMI Wikidata project Github
- ACMI Residency notebooks on Github
- ACMI Labs Wikidata bot on Github
- ACMI Residency Project Dashboard
- Cataloguing Practices in the Age of Linked Open Data: Wikidata and Wikibase for Film Archives, Adelheid Heftberger and Paul Duchesne (2020)
- Getting our Wikimedian-in-Residence Going, Indigo Holcombe-James on ACMI Labs