Interoperability as Equity: Collaborative Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graphs as a Tool to Shape Inclusive Ontologies

Drawing from the experience of developing the International [Digital] Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), this paper draws attention to the need for a collaborative, iterative, and multilingual approach to Linked Open Data (LOD) creation in colonially entangled cultural heritage contexts. We reflect on blind spots in existing LOD creation and curation practices and draw attention to features of the Wikimedia ecosystem that can be leveraged to enable a more equitable and epistemically flexible alternative. We discuss the successful incorporation of external ontologies from the biomedical sciences into Wikidata as an example of multistakeholder coordination that supports data interoperability. The paper closes with a reflection on areas in need of coordinated community action to ensure the interoperability of Wikidata with data standards adopted in other heritage contexts, particularly the CIDOC CRM ontology and its variants, which currently dominate the cultural heritage information management space.