Hi,

My view is that, in order for there to be any point in cultural heritage bodies (museums, libraries, archives, historians) publishing their collections etc. as Linked Data, there needs to be a common Linked Data framework representing the historical space-time universe, which they can all quote.  Current practice (such as the British Museum Linked Data offering) suggests that concepts such as people, places and events will otherwise be represented either by useless string values or by system-specific URLs which have no wider meaning.

As a result, I would like to explore the potential for Wikidata to act as this lingua franca for the cultural heritage community.

You'll see from my earlier messages to this list that I have been grappling with the SPARQL end-point. Initially I was confused by the interactive version of the Query Service [1], which differs in its response format from the similarly-URLed end-point and doesn't provide an RDF/XML response.  I have now managed to set up Wikidata as a 'web termlist' service for artists, within the Modes software (see attached screenshot). (The data in the pop-up window is generated on the fly from the Wikidata RDF.) 

At this point, I have the following questions:

1. what level of stability is planned as regards Wikidata identifiers/URLs?  Can I treat the full URL (e.g.[3]) as persistent, or can I only rely on the core Wikidata identifier (e.g. [4]) remaining unchanged into the indefinite future?  (Can I even rely on that?)

2. what is the policy on inclusivity?  Do entities need to be 'notable' in some sense to be accepted into Wikidata?  (I'm imagining a research body wanting to offer very precise place or event data, or someone with the ambition to include in Wikidata details of any person who ever lived.)

3. is there a template for each entity type (e.g. person, place, event) which guarantees that a query for certain properties will at least identify entities of the desired type?  (My artist termlist query includes a test '$s ps:P31 wd:Q5' which picks out humans: I'm not clear how I would do the same for events or places.)

Thanks,

Richard