Lozana Rossenova

✨ Inspiring read/listen by Audrey Tang @au@g0v.social on 'Software Freedom as Civic Care' and why it's not about licensing, or perfect systems, or being correct on the internet, but rather "whether the person who comes after you can still find the bug" - the lines between repair, complementary tools, AI in the human loop (not the other way around), leaving rollback paths, and room for refusal.

🔗 https://civic.ai/software-freedom-as-civic-care/
(via @mia@hcommons.social)

Highly recommended - opens so many new lines of thinking across FOSS x AI issues currently on focus with many of the communities I care about, including Wikimedia and this event in LDN: https://ai-bridges.org/2026/02/13/symposium/

At the AI Bridges symposium in London today, Leif Lobinsky from @wikimediaDE@social.wikimedia.de covers #Wikibase current use cases, applications and examples from the ecosystem, featuring also #Wikibase4Research from @nfdi4culture@nfdi.social @tibo.

More sessions and discussions throughout the two days bringing together Wiki communities, policy makers, users and developers with the special focus on considering implications of current AI developments for the whole movement and ethos of #wikimedia projects.

In the afternoon at AI-Bridges, Philippe Saadé from @wikimediaDE@social.wikimedia.de discusses the #Wikidata vector database and use cases for RAG, named entity recognition/ disambiguation and classification, but not only. The vectors are calculated per language (English, German, French & Arabic), but the search query entered in the LLM interface can be multilingual.

https://wd-vectordb.wmcloud.org/

A complementary development is the Wikidata MCP with a set of available tools. The connection to LLMs like Mistral (where connection to the internet can be interrupted, so that only source of truth becomes Wikidata), seems promising but not error-free yet esp. with SPARL query formulation & need to remove a lot of assumptions.

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:MCP

And brand new (since 2 days): Wikibase MCP -- https://wb-mcp.wmcloud.org/

📌 It took a while to get this out (because I kept coming across and needing to reflect on additional reference points) but finally the blog post on: "What do we mean when we talk about AI and open knowledge" or otherwise, reflections on the AI-Bridges Symposium held in London at the end of May, is published on the @tibhannover@openbiblio.social Blog.

🧶 It's a dense thinky-piece, but - just in time for some weekend reading - I hope some of it resonates. Open to feedback and critique, and hearing what others are thinking / writing about these thorny topics.

🔗 https://blog.tib.eu/2026/06/19/what-do-we-mean-when-we-talk-about-ai-and-open-knowledge/

#AIBridges #OpenKnowledge #OpenScience #DigitalCommons #KnowledgeCommons #Wikimedia #ECHOLOT

📝 An article we co-authored with @tibosl@openbiblio.social @tibhannover@openbiblio.social, colleagues Ina Blümel & Lucia Sohmen is finally out via the Journal of Open Humanities Data (special issue on #Wikidata): https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.440

It outlines hands-on learnings from the data curation workflows Lucia Sohmen has implemented in our lab within three concrete (and openly accessible) datasets. In addition, the article sets out the overall strategy Ina Blümel and myself have developed for managing cultural heritage data projects in the context of an interconnected Linked-Open-Data-driven Wikibase Ecosystem.

Check out the article, the supplement (with links to live queries & data viz) and let us know if it resonates with how you implement Wikidata in your digital humanities / cultural heritage projects!

#CulturalHeritage #Wikidata #Wikibase #DigitalHumanities #OpenScienceLab #LinkedOpenData

One more year of missing the Transformation Digital Art symposium hosted by LI-MA in Amsterdam in person, but at least had the chance to participate online and share some thoughts on how the EU infrastructure for Cultural Heritage (#ECHOES, #DataSpace4CulturalHeritage, #ECCCH) & sister projects, including @ECHOLOT_Project@mastodon.social, might be helpful also for the specific issues encountered by media art collections and initiatives, like festivals, that require special considerations for how knowledge is preserved, shared, accessed. Great to share the stage (virtually) with co-panelists, Tjarda de Haan, Florian van Zandwijk and Andrew Gryf Paterson, and chair - Elsbeth Kwant.

Hopefully next year in person!

https://li-ma.nl/article/transformation-digital-art-2026-day-2/

Shani Sigalov singlehandedly steered us through a full day of thinking and talking amongst a widely diverse group of stakeholders: #Wikimedia chapters and affiliates, researchers and academics, technologists and open knowledge advocates, policy makers and funders. AI-Bridges brought these communities together under the banner of collective action, with an active stance on the urgency of engaging seriously with the 'AI'- related issues - a shorthand for an entangled bundle of tools and services actually - affecting the #commons (open knowledge spaces).

From intros in the beginning of the day by the Bridges partners and affiliates - UoL SAS, Wikimedia chapters (Germany, UK, Brazil, Switzerland), Open Future, Pleias, to expert panels and roundtables.

And we're officially announcing the #ECHOLOT project publicly for the first time at the #MUDCon2025 with @krabina@mastodon.social from KMA, one of our partners in this new HORIZON Europe collaborative project. Bernhard provided some history and context to the project idea, and we outlined how we are reimagining the #MediaWiki software for the future of connected cultural heritage data together with a dozen other EU organisations. More details on the project will be published soon on the @tibhannover@openbiblio.social website.

In the meantime, stay tuned and follow along the MUDCon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjWzELDLmkc

#openscience #opensource #semanticmediawiki #wikibase

💫 And in more recruitment news - we also have an open (PT) position for a research software engineer at the @tibosl@openbiblio.social @tibhannover@openbiblio.social, focusing on helping us orchestrate and deliver research data management services to our project partners.

🔗 Full infos here: https://www.tib.eu/en/tib/careers-and-apprenticeships/vacancies/details/stellenausschreibung-nr-57-2025

📅 Deadline: Nov. 29.

📢 Please share widely in your networks: We offer a genuinely open, collaborative and flexible work environment, join the dream team and help us build better data services for GLAMs and open science institutes!

#openscience #opensource #softwareengineer #researchdatamanagement

✨ ☁️ And as final part of the afternoon at the #ECHOES annual meeting in Poznan today - a side-by-side discussion of how the European Data Space (for Cultural Heritage) relates to the Culture Cloud (and the hashtag#ECHOES project) by #Europeana Director Harry Verwayen and #ECHOES Coordinator Xavier Rodier.

🤝 In a nutshell, the Data Space is a more permanent space for cultural data access & reuse (it's public infrastructure) and the Cloud is a processing workspace for digital collaboration and the advancement of science & research. Crucially - the added value for all stakeholders involved - comes at the space of intersection - when the two initiatives can work in synergy as spaces for knowledge building and exchange. The slide images really paint a clear picture... in theory looks great, putting it in practice will be the hard work ahead of all teams involved over the next 5 years.

📜 A joint statement signed by both initiatives (on stage) should be officially published very soon, too!

#CulturalHeritage #CulturalData #CultureHeritageCloud #ECCCH #ECHOLOT

✨ We have an exciting new job opportunity in my team in @tibosl@openbiblio.social to manage an upcoming EU HORIZON project that might just revolutionize how cultural data can be interconnected, enriched and managed across institutional and project siloes.

🌐 Please share widely across your professional networks! *Application deadline: 16th Nov.*

🔗 https://www.tib.eu/en/tib/careers-and-apprenticeships/vacancies/details/stellenausschreibung-nr-52-2025

#openscience #jobs #culturalheritage #horizoneurope #FAIRdata

🎬 The @ECHOLOT_Project@mastodon.social is at the second annual meeting of the #ECHOES (the European Culture Heritage Cloud) in Poznań, Poland, this week.

📅 Today the event is open to the public (with options to attend online, see below) and stakeholders have a chance to hear more about the plans of ECHOES to integrate all sister projects (i.e. all the tools like #ECHOLOT building specialised services for the Culture Cloud) and to build capacity within the European cultural heritage communities.

⚙️ This morning we heard from various ECHOES colleagues on their activities to gather detailed information about community needs through consultation activities (factsheet already available online) and the roadmap for integration of services into the Cloud. A lot of challenges ahead, but great to learn more already about the possibilities for joining forces with and across the Cloud service providers.

🔗 More infos: https://www.echoes-eccch.eu/save-the-date-second-annual-event-in-poznan-poland/
https://www.echoes-eccch.eu/echoes-consultation/

#CulturalHerage #CulturalData #ECCCH

Next up at #MUDCon2025, Lukas Günther from @tibosl@openbiblio.social presents the work of the OSL team in configuring a flexible setup for our combined product #Wikibase4Research which wraps together #Wikibase, #SemanticMediaWiki, #SemanticWikibase, #SemanticKompakkt & more expensions useful to our research data management use cases, including our primary use cases in the context of @nfdi4culture@nfdi.social

📽️ Follow along live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCjaMnxgq2Q

#openscience #opensource

The conference abstract and slides from our joint presentation on Wikibase use cases across #NFDI4Objects, #NFDI4Culture and #NFDI4Memory at the #CHNT29 2024 conference in Vienna is now online.

🔗https://zenodo.org/records/14055699

Besides the range of possible applications across disciplines (think fuzzy geo locations for cultural objects, 3D representations, related historical people and events), we talked about federation. While we were able to showcase federation across 3 and more source databases, challenges in terms of "out-of-the-box" usability remain.

We hope to explore some more of these challenges in depth at the WikiMUC federated workshop in December (info: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiMUC/Federated_Queries_Workshop).

@tibosl@openbiblio.social @nfdi4culture@nfdi.social #CulturalHeritage #OpenScience #LinkedData #Federation #Wikibase

Love the seasons greetings work the @nfdi4culture@nfdi.social team in Mainz pulled off this year: serving festive knowledge graph geekery with a lovely ✨ SPARQL Xmas card generator. 🎄

Enjoy medieval stained glasswork & classical music notation at your leasure: https://nfdi4culture.de/kgxmas/

📢 The deadline for the project management position at @tibosl@openbiblio.social is now extended by two more weeks – until Nov 30th!

🔗 https://www.tib.eu/en/tib/careers-and-apprenticeships/vacancies/details/stellenausschreibung-nr-52-2025

Feel free to share across your research networks. This would be an important project part of the European Cultural Cloud initiative #ECCCH and the position will offer close work with some of the most important organisations shaping the future of #culturalheritage preservation and #researchdatamanagement in Europe!

#openscience #opensource #horizoneurope #FAIRdata

#MUDCon2025 day 3 continuing with different possibilities to customize MediaWiki instances for various use cases. @tibhannover@openbiblio.social colleague Alexander Gesinn presents on the visual potential of different graph visualization approaches (e.g. the KnowledgeGraph extension, and SRF Graph based on Graphviz) for hashtag#semanticmediawiki.

📽️ Follow the livestream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCjaMnxgq2Q

#opensource #mediawiki

📌 Nice post from Prof.Wiki highlighting recent work on the closer integration of #SemanticMediawiki and #Wikibase that was presented at the Mediawiki Users and Developers Conference in Vienna.

Also featured is our work at @tibosl@openbiblio.social with Kolja Bailly and Lukas Günther on Wikis for Manor Houses in the Baltic Sea Region, Climate Change Data, and Philosophy Texts, wide ranging topics and therefore interesting use cases for different functionalities.

Links to video recordings of the sessions are also in the post:
https://professional.wiki/en/news/connecting-wikibase-and-semantic-mediawiki#participate

A brief trip to the pretty city Tübingen to take part in #FORGE2023 and present some of the @nfdi4culture@nfdi.social services we are developing @tibosl@openbiblio.social, including https://nfdi4culture.de/services/details/semantic-kompakkt.html and https://nfdi4culture.de/services/details/annotation-terminology-lookup-and-personalization-antelope.html. Great to talk to DH researchers, archive and library system & infrastructure folks on potentials outside the parameters of our previous case studies. Lots of interest to engage more with NFDI services, but hint for us to make our infrastructure offers even more visible and available across a wide range of institutions.

🎙️ Tomasz Parkoła from PCSS Poznańskie Centrum (Poznan Supercomputing Centre) gives the keynote in the afternoon at the #ECHOES annual meeting in Poznan >> he discusses the EU AI Factories vision in relation to the Cultural Heritage sector & specifically as lead infrastructure partner in both #ECHOES (Culture Cloud) & #PIASTAI (the AI Factory node in Poland), PCSS can provide relevant perspectives on what productive synergies might look like.

📌 Some brief points from the presentation:
- 5% of global AI infrastructure - European; 75% US; 15% China >> so we have a way to go.
- But sector transformation is generally still low - relating mostly to media & tech sectors, close to CH sector, but not quite there yet.
- Also raw infrastructure is not enough >> this is an opportunity (for AI Factories) >> services on top are needed -- platform-as-a-service + AI models or pipelines (on demand).

⚙️ Here the activities in #ECHOES (& #ECHOLOT) that require such infrastructure and services could benefit from long-term & sustainable joint collaboration (& funding).