Wrapping up version one: Structured Data on Commons

As the three-year grant period for building Structured Data on Commons (SDC) comes to a close with the end of 2019, I’d like to share some lists of the past two year’s worth of planning, discussion, building, testing, and releases the team has done with the Commons community.

Design consultations

Mainly taking place in 2018, these design consultations are crucial to building the workflows that community members can use when the software is released.

• Computer-aided tagging design consultation (October 2019)
• Captions beta testing (December 2018)
• Structured licensing statements (November 2018)
• Review a prototype for searching structured Commons (October 2018)
• Review and discuss mockups for displaying the new metadata section of the file page (18 September – 9 October 2018)
• Depicts statements draft requirements (14 August – 31 August 2018)
• Multilingual captions and the file page (22 May – 07 June 2018)
• Design for multilingual captions in UploadWizard (23 January – 07 February 2018)

Data organization discussions

The community had to discuss, and continues to discuss, how to organize and model the various kinds of data that SDC supports.

• Data modeling (August 2019) – ongoing
• “Good coverage” for depicts tagging (September 2018) – ongoing
• Identify Wikidata properties that Commons will need (26 June – 14 August 2018) – properties table
• GLAM metadata and ontology mapping (19 April – 4 May 2018)
• Discussion on structured licensing and copyright (15 March – 02 April 2018)
• Ontology discussion (what goes where) (15 February – 01 March 2018)

The future

The SDC development team will continue working on structured data integration into Wikimedia projects, and there is some work left to do on Commons. Support for more statement types, as well as property constraints and a Commons query service, are planned.

• Complex top level statement support, such as
  • Geo-coordinates
  • Date
  • Strings
  • Quantity
  • URLs
  • External identifiers
• Constraints

The team looks forward entering the new year with this work to wrap up, and contribute towards making Commons more searchable, multilingual, and accessible for all to build.