Research project IM/RT/23/MetaBelgica (Research action IM)
MetaBelgica is a project that aims to create a Linked Data platform for Belgian entities shared among Federal Scientific Institutes (FSIs) in Belgium's cultural heritage sector. Currently, these institutes maintain duplicate data in different formats, making it inefficient for data exchange and international strategies. For instance, multiple records exist for the same painter, Rogier Van der Weyden, with different spellings. MetaBelgica seeks to integrate millions of Belgian entities from various FSIs into a shared platform, provide persistent identifiers (PIDs) for these entities, and improve data findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR principles). The project intends to use the Wikibase platform, which supports collaborative structured data, multilingualism, and semantic queries.
