OpenRefine is developing features for Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons and welcomes new members to its team!
Earlier in 2021, OpenRefine has received a project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation to add functionalities for Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons (SDC). This has been a major ask from the Wikimedia community, and will provide OpenRefine with powerful features for batch editing and uploading files with structured data on Wikimedia Commons, the media repository behind Wikipedia.
Welcome to OpenRefine's new team members!
Development has started in September 2021, and we are very happy that our team is now complete! Join us in welcoming OpenRefine's new team members:
Eugene Egbe is a software engineer from Cameroon. He is an active member of the African Wikimedia developers' community and has worked on various software applications in the Wikimedia ecosystem, including the ISA Tool and Scribe. For OpenRefine's SDC project, Eugene develops the Wikimedia-specific features, including a Wikimedia Commons reconciliation service.
Joey Salazar is a software engineer from Costa Rica, graduated in China, working in Internet Governance spaces in Europe and America. Continually advocating for free speech online and open source technologies, Joey focuses on policies, standards, and protocol implementations, in particular regarding the DNS and related privacy and censorship considerations. In the SDC project, Joey takes care of software development in OpenRefine's own codebase.
Sandra Fauconnier is an art historian who has engaged with digital projects in the cultural sector for many years. She is an active Wikimedian and a prolific user of OpenRefine, and has worked for the Wikimedia Foundation as part of the team which developed Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons. Sandra acts as product manager for the SDC project in OpenRefine.
The team is mentored by Antonin Delpeuch.
We are developing these new features in close collaboration with the Wikimedia community. You can read monthly reports of ongoing work on meta.wikimedia.org. Wikimedia-specific tasks are managed on Wikimedia's bug tracking system Phabricator, and OpenRefine-specific development is tracked on GitHub. If you have a Wikimedia account, you can subscribe to receive updates about the project on a talk page of your choice.
Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons?
What is Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons? Quite a few OpenRefine users will be familiar with Wikidata, the multilingual Linked Open Data knowledge base of the Wikimedia movement. Since 2019, media files (digital photographs, videos, sound files, etc) on Wikimedia Commons, can also be described with multilingual linked data from Wikidata.
OpenRefine already includes support for Wikidata and, more recently, arbitrary Wikibases. The new Structured Data on Commons features in OpenRefine will build further upon this.
Here's an early preview of structured data for a list of Wikimedia Commons files as displayed in OpenRefine:
