The data model is close to RDF, but not quite. Statements in items are reified statements, etc. Technically it is semantic data, where RDF is one possible representaton.

There was a decision choice to keep Mediawiki to ease reuse within the Wikimedia sites, mostly so users could reuse their knowledge, but also for devs to reuse existing infrastructure.

Some of the problems with Wd comes from the fact that the similarities isn't clear enough for the users, and possibly the devs, which have resulted in a slightly introvert community and a technical structure that is slightly more Wikipedia-centric than necessary.

On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 6:48 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l

Gerard, what about query functionality for example? This has been long promised but shows no real progress. And why do you think practical cases cannot be implemented using RDF? What is the justification for ignoring the whole standard and implementation stack? What makes you think Wikidata can do better than RDF? Martynas On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 6:48 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: It of it wrote: _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l

Gerard, what is there practical about having a query language that 1) is not a standard and never will be 2) is not supported by any other tool or project and never will be? I would understand this kind of reasoning coming from a hobbyist project, but not from one claiming to be a global "free linked database". Martynas On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 11:37 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: time.. a to things reuse of a wrote: used. use format have APIs, _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l

Martynas, Denny is right. You could set up a Virtuoso endpoint based on our RDF exports. This would be quite nice to have. That's one important reason why we created the exports, and I really hope we will soon see this happening. We are dealing here with a very large project, and the decision for or against a technology is not just a matter of our personal preference. If RDF can demonstrate added value, then there will surely be resources to further extend the support for it. So far, we are in the lead: we provide close to one billion (!) triples Wikidata knowledge to the world. So far, there is no known use of this data. We need to go step by step: some support from us, some practical usage from the RDF community, some more support from us, ... In reply to your initial email, Martynas, I have to say that you seem to have very little knowledge about what is going on in Wikidata. If you would follow the development reports more closely, you would know that most of the work is going into components that RDF does not replace at all. Querying with SPARQL is nice, but we are still more focussed on UI issues, history management, infrastructure integration (such as pushing changes to other sites), and many more things which are completely unrelated to RDF in every way. Your suggestion that a single file format would somehow magically make the construction of one of the world-largest community-edited knowledge bases a piece of cake is just naive. Now don't get me wrong: naive thinking has it's place in Wikidata -- it's always naive to try what others consider impossible -- but it should be combined with some positive, forward thinking attitude. I hope that our challenge to show the power of RDF to us can unleash some positive energies in you :-) I am looking forward to your results (and happy to help if you need some more details about the RDF dumps etc.). Best wishes, Markus On 29.10.2014 18:26, Denny Vrandečić wrote: _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l

Help with this would be awesome and totally welcome. The tracking bug is at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48143

On 30.10.2014 11:49, Cristian Consonni wrote: We are using OpenRDF. Can it do HDT? If yes, this would be easy to do. If no, it would be easier to use a standalone tool to transform our dumps. We could still do this. Do you have any recommendation what we could use there (i.e., a memory-efficient command-line conversion script for N3 -> HDT)?

Hey Phillip:) On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 7:41 PM, Phillip Rhodes <motley.crue.fan(a)gmail.com> wrote: Help with this would be awesome and totally welcome. The tracking bug is athttps://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48143

FWIW, put me in the camp of "people who want to see wikidata available via RDF" as well. I won't argue that RDF needs to be the *native* format for Wikidata, but I think it would be a crying shame for such a large knowledgebase to be cut off from seamless integration with the rest of the LinkedData world. That said, I don't really care if RDF/SPARQL support come later and are treated as an "add on", but I do think Wikidata should at least have that as a goal for "eventually". And if I can help make that happen, I'll try to pitch in however I can. I have some experiments I'm doing now, working on some new approaches to scaling RDF triplestores, so using the Wikidata data may be an interesting testbed for that down the road. And on a related note - and apologies if this has been discussed to death, but I haven't been on the list since the beginning - but I am curious if there is any formal collaboration (in-place|proposed|possible) between dbpedia and wikidata? Phil This message optimized for indexing by NSA PRISM On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 2:34 PM, Markus Krötzsch &lt;markus(a)semantic-mediawiki.org&gt; wrote: > Martynas, > > Denny is right. You could set up a Virtuoso endpoint based on our RDF > exports. This would be quite nice to have. That's one important reason why > we created the exports, and I really hope we will soon see this happening. > We are dealing here with a very large project, and the decision for or > against a technology is not just a matter of our personal preference. If RDF > can demonstrate added value, then there will surely be resources to further > extend the support for it. So far, we are in the lead: we provide close to > one billion (!) triples Wikidata knowledge to the world. So far, there is no > known use of this data. We need to go step by step: some support from us, > some practical usage from the RDF community, some more support from us, ... > > In reply to your initial email, Martynas, I have to say that you seem to > have very little knowledge about what is going on in Wikidata. If you would > follow the development reports more closely, you would know that most of the > work is going into components that RDF does not replace at all. Querying > with SPARQL is nice, but we are still more focussed on UI issues, history > management, infrastructure integration (such as pushing changes to other > sites), and many more things which are completely unrelated to RDF in every > way. Your suggestion that a single file format would somehow magically make > the construction of one of the world-largest community-edited knowledge > bases a piece of cake is just naive. > > Now don't get me wrong: naive thinking has it's place in Wikidata -- it's > always naive to try what others consider impossible -- but it should be > combined with some positive, forward thinking attitude. I hope that our > challenge to show the power of RDF to us can unleash some positive energies > in you :-) I am looking forward to your results (and happy to help if you > need some more details about the RDF dumps etc.). > > Best wishes, > > Markus > > > On 29.10.2014 18:26, Denny Vrandečić wrote: >> >> Martynas, >> >> since we had this discussion on this list previously, and again I am >> irked by your claim that we could just use standard RDF tools out of the >> box for Wikidata. >> >> I will shut up and concede that you are right if you manage to set up a >> standard open source RDF tool on an open source stack that contains the >> Wikidata knowledge base, is keeping up to date with the rate of changes >> that we have, and is able to answer queries from the public without >> choking and dying for 24 hours, before this year is over. Announce a few >> days in advance on this list when you will make the experiment. >> >> Technology has advanced by three years since we made the decision not to >> use standard RDF tools, so I am sure it should be much easier today. But >> last time I talked with people writing such tools, they were rather >> cautious due to our requirements. >> >> We still wouldn't have proven that it could deal with the expected QPS >> Wikidata will have, but heck, I would be surprised and I would admit >> that I was wrong with my decision if you can do that. >> >> Seriously, we did not snub RDF and SPARQL because we don't like it or >> don't know it. We decided against it *because* we know it so well and we >> realized it does not fulfill our requirements. >> >> Cheers, >> Denny >> >> On Mon Oct 27 2014 at 6:47:05 PM Martynas Jusevičius >> &lt;martynas(a)graphity.org <mailto:martynas@graphity.org>> wrote: >> >> Hey all, >> >> so I see there is some work being done on mapping Wikidata data model >> to RDF [1]. >> >> Just a thought: what if you actually used RDF and Wikidata's concepts >> modeled in it right from the start? And used standard RDF tools, APIs, >> query language (SPARQL) instead of building the whole thing from >> scratch? >> >> Is it just me or was this decision really a colossal waste of >> resources? >> >> >> [1] http://korrekt.org/papers/__Wikidata-RDF-export-2014.pdf >> <http://korrekt.org/papers/Wikidata-RDF-export-2014.pdf> >> >> Martynas >> http://graphityhq.com

On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 4:42 AM, Markus Krötzsch &lt;markus(a)semantic-mediawiki.org&gt; wrote: Only in passing, I'm only just starting to really dip my toes into the Wikidata waters now. Offhand I'd say that having RDF dumps is great, depending on how frequently they are exported. Of course I'd love to see live access to the current data via SPARQL in general, but my specific use-case can be driven off exports. Basically, I work on applying Semantic Web technology to enterprise / organizational knowledge management, using tools like Jena and Stanbol. As part of that, we do content enhancement and automatic entity linking with Stanbol. Right now we mainly use dbpedia for that, but I'm trying to figure out how data from Wikidata will play into this as well. Phil _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l