Examples of existing Wikibase instances in the field of DH and GLAM
Wikibase has become an important infrastructural tool for a range of Digital Humanities projects.
As discussed in chapter 2 and chapter 3, this is largely because it accommodates the types of heterogeneous, multilingual, and relational data that characterize much humanistic inquiry.
Rather than imposing a fixed ontology, it enables researchers to design data models suited to the epistemic structures of their particular materials. This adaptability has made it useful for projects concerned with reconstructing fragmented archives, tracing historical networks, and representing knowledge that does not align with standardized archival categories.
Wikibase instances in peer-reviewed publications
Wikibase instances that have been documented in academic publications in the filed of DH, the following table presents a curated list (in chronological order) of Wikibase instances that have been formally documented and studied in academic publications including their names, identifiers, URLs, and corresponding scholarly references.
Across such cases, it possible to see concrete examples on how Wikibase provides a technical framework through which data and relations can be materially explored and critically examined. Its flexible data model allows researchers to experiment with representations of complex or non-standard materials, while its support for provenance and querying provides mechanisms for analytical transparency.
Research Infrastructure & Semantic Web
Projects where the primary goal is building a technical platform, integrating disparate sources, or developing semantic web infrastructure for broader reuse.
- EU Knowledge Graph. This instance deploys Wikibase for the European Commission to integrate and synthesize various data sources related to European Union knowledge and information
- National Library of Greece. Already cited in Chapter 4
- FactGrid. FactGrid is a historical research database covering European history from the early modern period to the present. It provides structured data on individuals, events, places, and organizations, with particular attention to prosopography and the documentation of historical networks and biographies.
- ClaG. It is a Wikibase instance that serves as a collaborative classification tool specifically designed for toy libraries (ludoteche) and public libraries to organize their game collections. . It provides structured linked data for a game classification system developed by Carlo Bianchini and Paolo Munini at the University of Pavia.
- QAWiki. QAWiki applies Wikibase to the domain of question answering and knowledge verification, and queries questions in different languages over knowledge bases like Wikidata that can answer them.
Historical, Archival, and Prosopographical Research
Projects from or serving libraries, archives, museums, and historical research with a preservation/public knowledge mission.
- eViterbo. A platform combining a MediaWiki-based encyclopedia with an open, structured linked data database to serve as a collaborative Humanities research tool. It is developed by researchers at the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa and focuses on the documentation and preservation of Portuguese literature and cultural heritage
- MiMoTextBase. A different form of humanities inquiry is represented by MiMoTextBase at Trier University, which focuses on French Enlightenment novels. Here, Wikibase is used to synthesize information scattered across bibliographies, research publications, catalogues, and textual analyses. By linking authors, themes, publication places, and other textual or contextual features, the knowledge graph enables researchers to examine large-scale patterns and trajectories within literary history. The ability to integrate multilingual sources and record provenance for each statement is particularly significant for a field where interpretive claims must be traced back to their scholarly or documentary origins. In this case, the software does not replace traditional literary analysis but provides a complementary structure through which new questions about circulation, networks, and thematic clusters can be explored.
- Enslaved.org. The Enslaved.org project illustrates this clearly. Bringing together seven previously separate scholarly databases related to the transatlantic slave trade, it uses Wikibase as an intermediary framework for reconciling dispersed records of people, events, and archival sources. The integration of more than a million individual entries reveals connections that remain invisible when the datasets are viewed in isolation. For historians and genealogists examining the lives of enslaved individuals, such connectivity opens new interpretive possibilities. At the same time, the project highlights the methodological and ethical challenges of modelling data marked by absence, partial documentation, and historical violence. Decisions about how to represent uncertainty, contested identities, or incomplete archival traces become central to the scholarly process.
- Fuzzy Spatial Locations. Fuzzy Spatial Locations addresses the challenge of representing imprecise or vague geographic information in knowledge graphs. Using Wikibase, it develops methods for encoding spatial uncertainty, supporting applications in historical geography and archaeological research where exact coordinates are often unavailable.
- Semantic Lab at Pratt. This is the experimental Wikibase installation of the Semantic Lab at Pratt Institute. It functions primarily as a research datastore for the lab's digital humanities and cultural heritage projects, focusing on the domain of arts and music history
Languages and Lexicography
With a strong interest for minority languages
- Kurdî Wikibase. Dedicated to lexical data for the varieties of the Kurdish language.
- Qichwabase. This Wikibase instance focuses on the Quechua (Qichwa) language.
- Eusterm. This Wikibase instance serves as an educational platform for Basque terminology at EHU University of the Basque Country. It functions as a collaborative workspace where students develop concept schemes on a wide variety of subjects. The platform demonstrates how Wikibase can support pedagogical approaches to terminology work, allowing learners to practice both ontological modeling and textual documentation while building structured lexicographic resources for the Basque language.
- Monumenta Linguae Vasconum. This instance is used for several philological and linguistic experiments at the Dept. of Linguistics and Basque Studies, University of the Basque Country.
- Ontolagoon. Explores ontology-driven approaches to cultural and linguistic data related to the Venetian dialect and the fishing activities of the Venetian lagoon.
- ENEOLI. It contains a collection of terms dealing with lexical innovation called NeoVoc, bibliographical records from the field, and descriptions of Neologisms.
Arts Education
Wikibase has been adopted as a platform for arts education. The fact that Rhizome Artbase , one of the most famous archives in the field of digital media art, has adopted Wikibase in 2015[1] has helped to highlight its potential as a platform for arts education. Consulting this archive demonstrates how cataloging through semantic structuring is quite feasible even with very heterogeneous data that is full of ambiguity. Since statements in Wikibase can contain multiple claims for each property, the same item might be catalogued from multiple perspectives. This also means that Wikibase has enormous potential from an educational and artistic research perspective. The following examples explore sustainability EcHo of Images, as well as creative and speculative world views ParVO anchored in situated knowledge and intersectionality perspectives.
- EcHo of Images. Wikibase, designed as a digital‑humanities-oriented archive, the instance gathers textual, geographical, temporal, and audiovisual information related to the ecology of images, treating this material as capta (Drucker 2011) purposefully aligned with specific research questions from Arts Education. Four exploratory axes – Historical, Laboratory, Artistic, and Educational – provide a shared semantic framework that connects historical events, chemical processes in photography, artistic practices, and pedagogical materials. By enabling spatio‑temporal visualisations and graph‑based relationships through the EI frontend, the system supports critical reflection in arts education, offering students and educators a structured way to understand the environmental implications of image production and to explore more sustainable artistic methodologies.
- ParVO. Wikibase cloud that emerged within the Breaking the Code project as an Wikimedia‑based experimental project to challenge epistemic normativity in Arts Education by embracing error, ambiguity, and speculative misuse of structured data. Building on critiques of the semantic web and situated knowledge theories, the project uses Wikibase to create alternative taxonomies, cross‑domain classifications, and fictional vocabularies — such as kinship‑based currency classifications and Borges‑inspired taxonomies — to expose the limits of encyclopedic infrastructures. The authors propose “decyclopedisation” (Assis et al. 2025) as a conceptual framework for reconfiguring universalizing knowledge systems, demonstrating how structured data can become a medium for critical inquiry, creative intervention, and the production of situated, plural epistemologies.
Further examples
In Chapter 8, we highlight the important resource Wikibase World (https://wikibase.world/), which allows users to browse the wide variety of existing Wikibase instances.
However, the ontology used by Wikibase.world is not specifically tailored for filtering resources by Digital Humanities topics.
For an approach more relevant to the Digital Humanities community, the DHWiki Wikibase instance also aims to provide curated descriptive pages for Wikibase installations of particular interest. The dedicated category page (https://dhwiki.wikibase.cloud/wiki/Category:Wikibase_instances) collects and organises these entries, supporting discoverability and documentation of domain-specific use cases, including some project that have not been published yet but are worth being documented. [IF YOU DON?T HAVE SPACE CONVERT THESE SUBSECTIONS IN A QUCIK LIST OR COMPACT TABLE]
Beyond Notability
The project Beyond Notability (https://beyond-notability.wikibase.cloud/), which examines women’s contributions to archaeology, heritage, and museum work from 1870 to 1950, uses Wikibase to address the systematic underrepresentation of women in conventional archival and authority systems. Many of the roles women played during this period—administrative, logistical, pedagogical, or community-based—do not fit neatly into established vocabularies of professional activity. By developing a data model that can represent these varied forms of labor, the project makes visible aspects of historical participation that are otherwise difficult to articulate. However, this approach also raises questions about how to ethically encode lives and activities that may be only partially documented, and how to avoid re-inscribing historical biases through digital modelling.
MyCommunity
Community-centered Digital Humanities work presents yet another mode of engagement with the platform. The MyCommunity project (https://mycommunity.wikibase.cloud/) in Singapore, for example, uses Wikibase to organize oral histories, photographs, and personal artefacts that document the lived experiences of local residents. The goal is not simply archival preservation but the cultivation of a participatory historical record that acknowledges the contributions of ordinary people. Similar approaches can be observed in initiatives such as the RIWATCH Museum in Northeast India and the Evans-Tibbs Archive in the United States, where Wikibase is used to structure cultural collections and facilitate connections across dispersed materials. In these settings, the technology supports the work of communities and institutions seeking to document heritage in ways that respect local epistemologies and forms of knowledge transmission.
Hypotheseis and DataLib
Hypotheseis (https://hypotheseis.wikibase.cloud/) and DataLib (https://datalib.wikibase.cloud/) are two Wikibase Cloud instances regarding ancient Greek literature. The first is about rhetorical exercises in ancient Greek, from the first centuries AD to the Byzantine Period. The second is about the Letters of Libanius and the persons they mention. The goal is providing structured data about these topics, both taken from previous textual publications and collected ex novo, and using them to make queries in order to select smaller corpora crossing multiple criteria and to make statistical analysis.
Light and Noise Pollution Wikibase
The Light and Noise Pollution Wikibase (https://wikibase.world/wiki/Item:Q2625) serves as a multidisciplinary collaborative workbench, tailored on storing and structuring heterogeneous research outputs content from dedicated EC-funded projects. While it includes scientific and technical data, its scope extends significantly into the Digital Humanities through its incorporation of social science and legal dimensions. The Wikibase organizes content into key categories including public project Deliverables originally uploaded to the EC SyGMa Portal (enhancing accessibility via ontology), Sources (spanning legislation, academic publications, and gray literature providing a legal framework for understanding regulatory approaches to pollution control), and stakeholders and public administration metadata. This instance demonstrates Wikibase's application in environmental humanities and policy research, creating a structured, linked-data repository to address complex socio-technical issues.
OpusTessellatum-PT
Opustessellatum-PT (https://opustessellatum-pt.wikibase.cloud/) is an educational, scientific, and collaborative project dedicated to the study of Roman mosaics in Portugal. Roman mosaics represent some of the most significant achievements in technique, historical expression, and artistic ingenuity of Roman culture across the Mediterranean during Classical and Late Antiquity. They predominantly decorated the floors of public and private spaces, though examples also survive on walls and ceilings. The study of Roman mosaics can be approached from multiple perspectives, ranging from their material and technical aspects, summarised by the term opus tessellatum (work made from tesserae), to decorative schemes and iconography. One of the project’s main objectives is to introduce students to research methods, including bibliographic organisation and management, as well as the collection and processing of diverse qualitative and quantitative data. Digital methods and tools are employed to support rigorous, comparative, and integrated analysis. This Wikibase represents an essential step toward a broader initiative to assemble a digital corpus of Roman mosaics in Portuguese territory, enabling comprehensive thematic and contextual comparison within the wider Roman world.
CODA History of Architecture
CODA’s History of Architecture projects – Porto Barroco, Porto Renascentista – use Wikibase (https://arquitetura-flup.wikibase.cloud/wiki/Main_Page) and MediaWiki (https://wikimedia.pt/portobarroco/, https://wikimedia.pt/PortoRenascentista/) to document, structure, and disseminate architectural and artistic heritage through active, field‑based learning. Students conduct on‑site visits, collect photographic and descriptive data, and build structured records aligned with the FAIR principles, integrating Linked Open Data to ensure interoperability and long‑term scientific value. These projects combine historical research with digital methods and techniques, enabling students to inventory buildings, analyse stylistic and material features, and contribute to open knowledge ecosystems such as Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. By merging project‑based learning with community engagement and digital humanities tools, these activities strengthen students’ technical, analytical, and collaborative skills, while producing sustainable and publicly accessible heritage resources.
Centro Documental del Cine de Almería
The Centro Documental del Cine de Almería[2] (CDCA, in English: Almería Cinema Documentation Center) maintains a knowledge graph documenting the history of the filming production in the province of Almería in 1951 until today. The province has been the setting for at least 400 films and an unknown number of music videos and television commercials, most of them international productions. However, no comprehensive list has ever been compiled. For this reason, the CDCA is compiling, digitising and preserving digital data on the history of film production in the province of Almería (Spain). Many of the items come from personal collections, especially family photographs, and others have been created by the CDCA from recordings of oral interviews. This information is compiled as a testimony to social and cultural relations, covering areas such as work, film production and consumption in cinemas and open-air venues, etc.
The ontology of the graph is based on the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM),[3] as well as extensions of CRM and others.
