Get a demo

All use cases

Cultural heritage · GLAM

Linked open data your curators can maintain

Galleries, libraries, archives and museums need collection data that travels in shared standards. NeoWiki, an open-source MediaWiki extension, lets curators work in forms built from your own schemas and publishes each record as linked open data in those standards. Its cultural-heritage work is shaped by ECHOLOT, an EU Horizon Europe research consortium.

Self-Portraitcreated 1640oil on canvasRembrandt1606–1669Amsterdammade bypainted inactive inSelf-Portraitcreated 1640oil on canvasRembrandt1606–1669Amsterdammade bypainted inactive in

Curate in your own model ​

Curators contribute through forms, with no RDF to hand-write, and scripts load existing records through the REST API. Use NeoWiki as your catalogue, or beside the collection management system you already run. You can record a title or description in several languages at once. Every change is attributed and versioned, and any fact can carry its source.

Publish in EDM, CIDOC-CRM and other vocabularies ​

You can map your schemas to standard vocabularies such as CIDOC-CRM, Dublin Core, EDM or BIBFRAME, several at once. A mapping reshapes the data where the target demands it, so what reaches a partner system is that ontology, not your internal model under new names. A data specialist writes each mapping once, as a versioned wiki page, and NeoWiki's demo data includes EDM and CIDOC-CRM mappings to start from. Every record has a stable, dereferenceable URI.

Query your collection with SPARQL ​

As you edit, NeoWiki mirrors the data into any SPARQL 1.1 store, such as QLever, Oxigraph, or Fuseki, so a collection answers the questions that matter: how a workshop connects to its patrons, what an object's provenance chain is, which works survive from a collection long since dispersed. One store can hold your data in your own model and in EDM side by side, and a single query can combine both.

Bring your own AI ​

Connect the assistant of your choice through the MediaWiki MCP server for AI-assisted curation and retrieval. Every edit it makes is attributed like anyone else's.

Open source, and yours to keep ​

Self-host NeoWiki from its GPL-licensed code, or let Professional Wiki run it. Either way, standards-based exports mean you can always walk. For publicly funded heritage work, that independence is the point.

Weighing Wikibase or Semantic MediaWiki? Compare NeoWiki with Wikibase and Semantic MediaWiki.

Built with ECHOLOT ​

NeoWiki is ECHOLOT's core system, and Professional Wiki leads its development. ECHOLOT is an EU Horizon Europe consortium building tools for the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage, funded through 2028.

Flag of the European Union

ECHOLOT has received funding from the European Union's European Research Executive Agency under grant agreement Nº 101233096. Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. More on ECHOLOT and EU funding.

Across the consortium, five case studies shape and test NeoWiki:

  • The first shared pool of entity identifiers for Basque cultural heritage, across fragmented and multilingual datasets.
  • Multilingual European literary bibliography, transformed and enriched from library MARC data.
  • Diverse media-art collections, harmonised across institutions.
  • Flemish fine and performing arts, published to Wikimedia Commons and Europeana.
  • GLAM data round-tripped: published out, with enrichments fed back to the source.

Where NeoWiki is going ​

  • RDF import and JSON-LD export.
  • Import from existing catalogues and from Wikidata, with reconciliation and enrichment.
  • Querying across institutions.
  • Rights statements and finer-grained provenance tooling.
  • Chain-of-production tracking.
  • Visualisations that read a collection at a glance.

ECHOLOT funds much of this work; what lands in NeoWiki is open source, for any institution to use.

Want the full picture? See all of NeoWiki's capabilities.

Recognize your situation?

Let's talk through the specifics.

Talk to usTry the sandbox