Development of a semantic data collection tool. : The Wikidata Project as a step towards the semantic web.

The World Wide Web contains a vast amount of information. This feature makes it a very useful part of our everyday activities but the information contained within is made up of an exponentially increasing repository of semantically unstructured data. The semantic web movement involves the evolution of the existing World Wide web in order to enable computers make meaning of and understand the data they process and consequently increase their processing capabilities. Over the past decade a number of new projects implementing the semantic web technology have been developed albeit still in their infancy. These projects are based on semantic data models and one such is the Wikidata project. The Wikidata project is targeted at providing a more semantic platform for editing and sharing data throughout the Wikipedia and Wikimedia communities. This project studies how the Wikidata project facilitates such a semantic platform for the Wikimedia communities and includes the development of an application utilizing the semantic capabilities of Wikidata. The objective of the project is to develop an application capable of retrieving and presenting statistical data and also be able to make missing or invalid data on Wikidata detectable. The result is an application currently aimed at researchers and students who require a convenient tool for statistical data collection and data mining projects. Usability and performance tests of the application are also conducted with the results presented in the report. Keywords: Semantic web, World Wide Web, Semantic data model, Wikidata, data mining