Hi Chris
AS someone who as worked with the old Wikidata code, I must say I very much
prefer to start over. The old code is convoluted and scales poorly.
The approach of the new Wikibase extension is much cleaner. Some advantages:
* we can use the storage and versioning facilities of mediawiki without any
changes, and still have efficient mechanisms for querying data.
* We can easily deal with complex, nested data structures
* We have a powerful but well-defined data model for representing concepts
("items" in wikibase terminology). Among other things, source references for any
claim are an integral part of the system.
* Properties and data schemans can be maintained on-wiki, without any need for
changes to the configuration or database.
* We are free to implement a federation mechanism (updates for "client" sites)
the way that best fits our needs.
We have considered both Wikidata/OmegaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki as a base to
build on, but decided to implement the core of Wikibase from scratch, mainly for
the above reasons.
-- daniel
On 10.05.2012 11:28, Chris Tophe wrote:
> Denny Vrandečić <denny.vrandecic@...> writes:
>
>> * OmegaWiki is geared towards replacing the Wiktionaries. Thus OmegaWiki
>> talks
> about words and their translations, the meaning of the words being given by
> their defined meaning.
>
> Actually, yes, this is what OmegaWiki is about,
> but OmegaWiki is only one possible implementation of Wikidata.
>
> The "Wikidata extension" is in fact more generally about replacing
> a standard wiki page, where you write everything in one field, with
> a structured data wiki page, where you have many fields of different
> types (text, checkboxes, comboboxes, etc. we have all this at OmegaWiki),
> and where each field is stored in a separate database table.
>
> So, a list of languages/translations in omegawiki could be easily replaced
> by a list of languages/interwikilink.
>
> However, I must admit that the Wikidata code is very complex and poorly
> documented, so that it might be actually faster to do everything from scratch
> for your needs.
> Furthermore, since OmegaWiki has been the only implementation of Wikidata,
> some work would be needed to separate what is actually OW-specific from the
> rest
> (which is why I am interested in the other direction of contribution,
> i.e. adapting Wikibase for OmegaWiki, if this is possible).
>
> I'll try connecting to chatzilla on evenings or week-ends.
>
> Cheers,
> Christophe
>
>
>
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--
Daniel Kinzler, Softwarearchitekt
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