Everyone depends on reference data, nobody quite owns it
You keep the data other systems key on: names of people and places, classifications, subject headings, registers of institutions, lists of protected sites. Several departments and partner institutions feed it. It has to stay internally consistent, aligned with national and international authority files, and published in the formats downstream systems expect.
Most of it lives in spreadsheets, a legacy thesaurus tool, or a database one person knows how to work. Changes are hard to trace, contributions from outside are hard to accept safely, and publishing is an afterthought done by hand.
Governed from entry to publication
Each concept, person, place, institution, or classification is a record with a Schema: which fields exist, which are required, which values are allowed, how it links to broader terms and to its counterparts in external authority files. Contributors work in forms derived from that Schema, your own staff and partner institutions alike, with validation at the point of entry and no syntax to learn. You can record a term's labels and definitions in several languages. You set read and edit permissions per page, so a partner maintains its own entries and nothing else.
Every change is attributed and versioned: who asserted a term, when, and what it replaced. The result is a vocabulary you can stand behind, because the record shows how it came to be.
Publishing is built in. Every record has a stable, dereferenceable URI and exports as RDF, and you can map it to the vocabularies your partners consume, such as SKOS, several at once. Query the whole graph in SPARQL or Cypher: every term without a broader concept, every register entry that lapsed, everything aligned to a given external authority.
It runs where your rules require: on your own infrastructure, or on Professional Wiki's managed hosting in the EU. It is open source, and standards-based exports mean the data is never captive.
Where NeoWiki is going
The ECHOLOT research consortium tests NeoWiki on building the first shared pool of entity identifiers for Basque cultural heritage.
Bulk import from existing files and authority services is on the roadmap, as is approval before a change reaches the published data. Until bulk import ships, we can map and import your existing vocabulary or authority file as an add-on to our managed hosting.