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FactGrid provides projects with historical research interests with a collectively organized
Wikibase Wikibase is a set of software tools for working with versioned semi-structured data in a central repository. It is based upon JSON instead of the unstructured data of wikitext normally used in MediaWiki. It stores and organizes information that ...
graph database, allowing them to interconnect research data both on the platform and into external research repositories. Persistent identifiers for previously undocumented objects of research, the use of competing ontologies, the multilingual availability of data sets, and the long-term maintenance of the data sets, which remain collectively editable, are key features of the platform. The platform was initiated by Olaf Simons in 2017/2018 in a cooperation between the Gotha Research Centre of the
University of Erfurt The University of Erfurt () is a public university located in Erfurt, the capital city of the German state of Thuringia. It was founded in 1379, and closed in 1816. It was re-established in 1994, three years after German reunification. Therefore ...
and
Wikimedia Germany Wikimedia Deutschland (also known as WMDE, Wikimedia Germany, and the Society for the Promotion of Free Knowledge) is a German non-profit association based in Berlin. It was founded in 2004 and recognized that year as the first national chapter o ...
. It s currently (as of February 2024) supported by around 400 users in about 50 projects ranging from
Assyriology Assyriology (from Greek , ''Assyriā''; and , ''-logia''), also known as Cuneiform studies or Ancient Near East studies, is the archaeological, anthropological, historical, and linguistic study of the cultures that used cuneiform writing. The fie ...
to
Contemporary History Contemporary history, in English-language historiography, is a subset of modern history that describes the historical period from about 1945 to the present. In the social sciences, contemporary history is also continuous with, and related t ...
. The number of 1 million database items was passed on 13 October 2024. All services are free and - since March 2023 financed by the NFDI4Memory consortium of the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI). The Historical Data Center of Saxony-Anhalt and the NFDI4Memory data connectivity team working there under Katrin Moeller are playing a key role in project support since April 2023.


Technical basis

FactGrid uses
Wikidata Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, are able to use under the CC0 public domain ...
's Wikibase software without major modifications of the user interface ( Horace-Bénédict de Saussure's
Cyanometer A cyanometer (from ''cyan'' and '' -meter'') is an instrument for measuring " blueness", specifically the colour intensity of blue sky. It is attributed to Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and Alexander von Humboldt. It consists of squares of pa ...
is providing the logo motif). The instance is set up without a docker image. The
MediaWiki MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker,mailarchive:wikipedia-l/2001-August/000382.html, Magnus Manske's announc ...
platform includes a
WordPress WordPress (WP, or WordPress.org) is a web content management system. It was originally created as a tool to publish blogs but has evolved to support publishing other web content, including more traditional websites, electronic mailing list, ma ...
blog as well as the ''FactGrid Viewer'' developed by Bruno Belhoste, (a tool similar to
Magnus Manske Heinrich Magnus Manske (born 24May 1974) is a German biochemist who is a leading researcher on malaria. He is a senior staff scientist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK and a software developer of one of the first versions of th ...
's ''Reasonator'') which presents database information in structured compilations in a direct communication with the database. The FactGrid Viewer offers the special service of fusing transcript pages from MediaWiki text pages into the information stored on the Wikibase items.


Development

The main incentive to create FactGrid as a sister platform to Wikidata was in 2016/2017 the idea of a platform that will focus on “original research” and that will work without further “notability criteria” - solely organised by the scientific community. Wikimedia projects would be able, so the aim, to cited FactGrid data as “externally published” together with information about the projects and the project teams that produced the data. The greater freedom that is granted to users on FactGrid is balanced by the greater transparency under which user are acting on the platform: The use of registered real name accounts is mandatory and all projects are requested to state their research interests with data they are generating on the platform.See th
FactGrid Terms of Service
First reservations about the risks of data theft and plagiarism on the openly visible platform have lost their initial importance. FactGrid data are CC0 licensed and open to any download, while they come with research metadata which can be easily quoted in external presentations; the platform is thus an interesting tool to move fresh data into public reception. The software, so the corresponding awareness, does not incite edit wars. Allowing the display of conflicting information with the respective sources Wikibase is rather an interesting medium to map complex data situations. The resource's size growth was approximately 100,000 database objects annually between 2018 and 2023. The current growth rate appears to be growing to 200,000 database objects per year with tailwind of the ongoing the NFDI process in Germany. The database fully supports the four languages of the bigger user groups: German, French, Spanish and English. Most of the properties are also available in Hungarian and Chinese.


Applications

* FactGrid Wikibase Datenbase: https://database.factgrid.de/wiki/Main_Page :* FactGrid Viewer: https://database.factgrid.de/viewer/ :* Project blog: https://blog.factgrid.de/ :* Projekt space: https://database.factgrid.de/wiki/FactGrid:Projects :* Sample queries https://database.factgrid.de/wiki/FactGrid:Sample_queries


Further reading

* Charles B. Faulhaber/ Óscar Perea Rodríguez, PhiloBiblon as a Digital Tool for Historians of Medieval Iberia, UC Berkeley. http://dx.doi.org/10.21001/itma.2023.16.15 Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9t279727 * Olaf Simons: Keine Selbstverständlichkeit: Citizen Science auf der FactGrid Wikibase-Plattform, in: René Smolarski/ Hendrikje Carius/ Martin Prell, ''Citizen Science in den Geschichtswissenschaften'' (Göttingen, 2023), S. 241–264
Google books
* Olaf Simons: Stadtgeschichte im digitalen Zeitalter – Der FactGrid-Gotha-Datens(ch)atz, in: Moderne Stadtgeschichte(n) und ihre Perspektiven, hrsg. von Alexander Krünes (Leipzig. Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2023), S. 103–120. * Patricia García Sánchez-Migallón: FactGrid, una base de datos para datos históricos, y su relación con Philobiblon, in ''Janus: Estudios sobre el Siglo de Oro'', 5. Juni 2023. https://www.janusdigital.es/articulo.htm?id=244


References

{{reflist Knowledge graphs Wikimedia projects Lexical databases Online databases Community websites Creative Commons-licensed websites Open data Internet properties established in 2018 Historiography