Automating Values in Wikibase

Automating Values in Wikibase

You can now automate the creation of values in your Wikibase wiki. This is made possible by our latest Wikibase extension: Automated Values. In this post you will learn what the extension can do, and how you can get started.

Many collections of data come with rules. For instance, the full name of a Person might be required to be equal to their first name, followed by their last name. Several of our clients, such as the Luxembourg Ministry of Culture, and the German National Library, have such rules for the data they have inside of their Wikibase wikis. Until today, these rules would need to be enforced manually, or be applied by external tools. With the release of the Automated Values extension, you can now define such rules directly in your Wikibase.

Automated Values allows defining rules that build values from statement main values or from qualifier values. The first release supports settings labels and aliases based on these build values.

We created the Automated Values extension for the Luxembourg Ministry of Culture, who financed the work. Special thanks go to Maarten Zeinstra and Maarten Brinkerink for coordinating the project.

Automated Values is available as free open source software (GPLv2) that can be installed on any Wikibase instance. You can find the source code and documentation in the Automated Values GitHub project. Your contributions are welcome.

Get Started

View the installation instructions and documentation.

Participate

Further Plans / Upcoming Features

It is clear that many Wikibase wikis benefit from having highly integrated application of their rules. Automated Values already has received plenty of interest from members of the Wikibase Stakeholders Group, and it is clear much more can be done in the future. Here are some potential future enhancements:

  • Automatically generated statement values
  • Automatically generated descriptions
  • More capable Entity Criteria, for instance comparison of value types other than String or EntityId
  • Automatic re-application of a rule to all entities when modifying that rule

Get in touch to commission the Wikibase Consultancy for any of these features or other enhancements. We also provide various other commercial Wikibase services such as Fully Managed Wikibase hosting and Wikibase Installation.

See also

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