Hi! > The choice for SPARQL was not made by me or by anyone who has a special > interest in pushing this particular formalism (in fact Nik and Stas can > confirm that I have been quite sceptical about the feasibility of using > BlazeGraph at first). It was the result of an open-minded discussion
We all has some skepticism, not specifically BlazeGraph but in general RDF as an underlying data model due to significant complexity in Wikidata's own data which requires some work to fit into the triples model. After constructing the big spreadheet and analyzing all the options and thinking a bit more on the data model and its usage, we however changed our opinion and decided that the problems which we face are solvable and that solving them would be the way to go. BlezaGraph specifically emerged as the best available solution due to combination of features, extensibility, openness and support provided by their team. The fact that we are basing on existing technology (RDF/SPARQL) with developed practices was a factor, but not the only overriding one. We can not claim we know with absolute certainty the only best way to proceed. We can, however, make a honest effort to evaluate all available options and choose the one that we perceive to be the best at the moment. That's what we did. Of course, as we gain more experience and as environments change, we may add another option or even arrive to the conclusion we were mistaken. There's no guarantee against that. But for now we're proceeding with what we have as the best. As for WDQ, it being a simple language it probably not hard to translate to SPARQL. I'm not sure if that would be good SPARQL but I hope query optimizer would take care of that (yeah, I know it's not magic but we'll see). I'll try to put something together pretty soon and see how it behaves. Some of the WDQ features - such is wide branching with "OR" options - may be quite inefficient in SPARQL, but we can generate it anyway. I'll update when I have something interesting (probably next week). -- Stas Malyshev [email protected] _______________________________________________ Wikidata-tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-tech
