Wikidata infrastructure supports ShEx

The ShEx Community Group is excited by the recent announcement that Wikidata’s support for ShEx has moved from testing to deployment. This will increase its existing use for facilitating consensus around domain models as a basis for quality assurance. “In the spirit of Wikidata not restricting the world,” explains Léa Lacroix of Wikidata, “Shape Expressions are a tool to highlight, not prevent, errors.”

Using a new Wikidata extension, ShEx schemas (such as the schema for disease) are stored in ShEx compact syntax on wiki pages and linked to a tool for checking selected data. Next in the development pipeline will be a tool for suggesting a basic structure when new Wikidata items are added.

Links:

• Wikidata announcement of 19 May 2019
• WikiProject_ShEx
• Youtube video presented at the Wikimedia Hackathon, 19 May 2019