Wikxhibit: Using HTML and Wikidata to Author Applications that Link Data Across the Web

Abstract

Wikidata is a companion to Wikipedia that captures a substantial part of the information about most Wikipedia entities in machine-readable structured form. In addition to directly representing information from Wikipedia itself, Wikidata also cross-references how additional information about these entities can be accessed through APIs on hundreds of other websites. This trove of valuable information has become a source of numerous domain-specific information presentations on the web, such as art galleries or directories of actors. Developers have created a number of such tools that present Wikidata data, sometimes combined with data accessed through Wikidata’s cross-referenced web APIs. However, the creation of these presentations requires significant programming effort and is often impossible for non-programmers. In this work, we empower users, even non-programmers, to create presentations of Wikidata and other sources of data on the web, using only HTML with no additional programming. We present Wikxhibit, a JavaScript library for creating HTML-based data presentations of data on Wikidata and the other data APIs it cross-references. Wikxhibit allows a user to author plain HTML that, with the addition of a few new attributes, is able to dynamically fetch and display any Wikidata data or its cross-referenced Web APIs. Wikxhibit’s JavaScript library uses Wikidata as the bridge to connect all the cross-referenced web APIs, allowing users to aggregate data from multiple Web APIs at once, seamlessly connecting object to object, without even realizing that they are pulling data from multiple websites. We integrate Wikxhibit with Mavo, an HTML language extension for describing web applications declaratively, to empower plain-HTML authors to create presentations of Wikidata. Our evaluation shows that users, even non-programmers, can create presentations of Wikidata and other sources of web data using Wikxhibit in just 5 minutes.