Structure your data: Wikibase Workshop in Ghent

With almost 50 participants on the first day, this gathering was the largest workshop of people interested in Wikibase so far. The participants were asked to bring their own data sets to the workshop to upload to their own Wikibase instance and turn them into Linked Data. The projects were very diverse and ranged from collections of musical instruments to a vocabulary for land ownership.

In a series of team sessions, participants learned to model their data first: which properties are needed to describe the data? Later, uploads with Python scripts and other tools were introduced.

Structuring and linking your own data will help institutions and researchers to tell a story behind the data — the links add the value to what is already collected but maybe not discoverable. By using Wikibase and Wikidata, data can live in a larger, diverse Wikibase ecosystem. Linking data with Wikibase to the information that is already in Wikidata can turn this data into new knowledge.