On the Flipside: Wikidata for Cultural Heritage Metadata through the Example of Numismatic Description

This paper reports on an ongoing project at Princeton University Library to model numismatic descriptive metadata using FRBR-oo and Wikidata. Wikidata’s lack of cardinality constraints makes it unsuitable as a standalone data model for cultural heritage description but leaves it unrivaled as point of convergence for data from different vocabularies and ontologies. Conversely, FRBR-oo’s event-based approach positions it uniquely to model a complete set of data points relating to descriptive objects’ creation, administrative life cycle, and relationships transcending custodial contexts, but faces implementation challenges owing to its complexity. Using the example of numismatic description, we argue that when deployed in conjunction with one another, the descriptive rigor of FRBR-oo mapped to Wikidata and serviced using the Wikibase technology form a production-ready platform for GLAM descriptive metadata.