Hi,

After looking at the RDF format closely, I am asking if the item, statement and reference IRIs could/should be directly resolvable to XML/JSON formatted resources.  

It seems that currently http://www.wikidata.org/entity/.... redirects to the UI at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/ which is not what a machine reader would expect.

Without a simple method to resolve the IRIs (perhaps a RESTful API?), these RDF data objects are opaque for parsers.

Of course, with wbgetclaims, it is possible to get the statement like this:

but the API expected GUID format does not match the RDF UUID representation (there is a $ or "%24" after the item instead of a -) and it returns both the statement and the references.  

Since the reference is its own node in the RDF,  it can be queried independently.  For example, to ask "return all of the statements where reference R is bound."  But then, the return value is a list of statement IDs and a subquery or separate query is then required to return the associated statement node. 

I am also wondering why item, statement and reference "UUIDs" are not in canonical format in the RDF.  This is a question of compliance with IETF guidelines, which may or may not be relevant.

Item: Q20913766

Statement: Q20913766-CD281698-E1D0-43A1-BEEA-E2A60E5A88F1

Reference: 39f3ce979f9d84a0ebf09abe1702bf22326695e9

See: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/Indexing/RDF_Dump_Format

See: http://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-namespaces/urn-namespaces.xhtml and http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4122 for information on urn:uuid guidelines.

Thanks for your feedback,

Christopher