Open Tool Registries! Resolving the Directory Paradox with Wikidata

This paper introduces the conceptual framework for open and community-curated tool registries, posing that such registries provide fundamental value to any field of research by acting as curated knowledge bases about a community’s past and current methodological practices as well as authority files for individual tools. The modular framework of a basic data model, SPARQL queries, bash scripts, and a prototypical web interface builds upon the well-established and open infrastructures of Wikimedia, GitLab, and Zenodo for creating, maintaining, sharing, curating, and archiving linked open data. We demonstrate the feasibility of this framework by introducing our concrete implementation of a tool registry for digital humanities, initially repurposing data from existing silos, such as TAPoR and the SSH Open Marketplace, and retaining the established TaDiRAH classification scheme while being open to communal editing in every aspect.