Obviously, you all expect me to agree with Martynas, in view of my job, and I do:-). But I do not only because I work for W3C, but I indeed genuinely believe that reinventing things here may be way too costly on long term...
Note also that W3C may start a new group later this year that would look at a 'lower' level HTTP protocol to manage (read and write) RDF data without necessarily using SPARQL. This may be useful for the project as well. Ivan On Mar 28, 2012, at 18:02 , Martynas Jusevicius wrote: > Hey all, > > I've been reading some of the technical notes on Wikidata, for example > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Notes/Data_model > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Nikola_Smolenski/Wikidata#Query_language > > Statements like "[data model] similar to RDF, but allows qualified > property values" and "should there be a query language that will > enable querying of the data?" concern me a great deal regarding the > future of the whole Wikidata project. > > It seems to me that whoever is making these technical decisions does > not fully realize the price of reinventing the bike -- or in this > situation, reinventing data models/formats/standards. Having designed > and implemented production-grade applications both on RDBMSs, XML, and > RDF, I strogly suggest you should base Wikidata on standard RDF. > > I know some/most of you are coming from the wiki background which > might be hard to get over with, but if Wikidata is to become a free > and open knowledge base on the (Semantic) Web, then RDF is the free > and open industry standard for that. Whatever little advantage you > would get from developing a custom non-standard data model, think how > many man-years of standardization and tool development you would > loose. Isn't knowledge about standing on the shoulders of giants? RDF > has all the specifications, a variety of tools, and DBPedia as a very > solid proof-of-concept (which I also think should be better integrated > with this project) necessary to build Wikidata. > With SPARQL Update, full read/write RDF roundtrip is possible (and > works in practice). It also makes the notion of API rather obsolete, > since SPARQL Update (and related mechanisms) is the only generic > API-method one has to deal with. > > To round up -- I think failure to realize the potential of RDF for > Wikidata would be a huge waste of resources for this project, > Wikipedia, and the general public. > > Martynas > graphity.org > > _______________________________________________ > Wikidata-l mailing list > Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l ---- Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/ mobile: +31-641044153 FOAF: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf.rdf
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
_______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
