Hi Martynas, that is a good observation! First, rest assured -- there are a number of people involved in Wikidata who have very intimate knowledge of RDF, OWL, SPARQL -- some of us have been working on these standards actually :) We do fully understand the value of these standards.
We will export our data in RDF. But this does not mean that our internal data model has to be RDF. Think about Drupal or Semantic MediaWiki: both export a lot of their data in RDF, but their internal data models are very different. And still, they are great citizens of the Web of Data, I'd reckon. Or even think about Wikipedia: obviously, articles of Wikipedia are "exported" as HTML, so that browsers can display them. But the internal mark-up language to create, edit, and maintain the articles is not HTML, but MediaWiki syntax. I hope this helps with your concerns :) Cheers, Denny 2012/3/28 Martynas Jusevicius <marty...@graphity.org> > 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 > -- Project director Wikidata Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Eisenacher Straße 2 | 10777 Berlin Tel. +49-30-219 158 26-0 | http://wikimedia.de Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.
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