Jeroen I encourage you to look closely at JSON-LD, because this is
precisely the use case it was designed for.

Depending on how you choose to encode your data in JSON-LD, it need not
offer any additional complexities to a consumer of the data. For instance,
you can supply a link to a JSON-LD Context in an HTTP Link Header.

The big advantages of JSON-LD over other JSON-based representations of
linked data come from the use of the JSON-LD "Context". By associating the
JSON object with a Context, you can map from the strings used as JSON names
(such as "sister city") to full URIs such as (I'm guessing) <
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P123>. Data consumers who wish to
treat the JSON object simply as JSON can use the strings as keys, but
JSON-LD aware consumers can parse the data as RDF if they wish. Even
developers who don't use the JSON-LD features at runtime can at least use
them to identify the meanings of those strings when they are writing their
Javascript code.

Conal

On 3 December 2015 at 05:46, Jeroen De Dauw <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hey,
>
> Conal, thanks for explaining. The items are indeed not linked. Indeed, the
> current format hides the fact that they are items altogether. Perhaps this
> is going a step too far, and it is better to take an approach similar to
> that of Hay: still have a dedicated wikibase-item data type for which the
> value includes the id, but also the label. What are your thoughts on using
> this approach [0]? (Everyone is welcome to comment on this.) As you can
> see, it makes the format significantly more verbose and is not quite as
> trivial to use when you don't care about the links or ids. It's still a lot
> simpler than dealing with the canonical Wikibase item format, and perhaps
> strikes a better balance than what I created initially.
>
> [0] https://gist.github.com/JeroenDeDauw/fc17f9fdd2e4567a17ff
>
> > And if the data serialization is JSON, why not use JSON-LD which is
> > all the rage these days? http://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld/
>
> Thanks for the suggestion. I'm not really familiar with JSON-LD and
> quickly read through the examples there. While this is certainly
> interesting, I wonder what the actual benefits are, going on the assumption
> that most developers are unfamiliar with this format. It does add
> complexity, so I'm quite hesitant to use this in the main format. That
> said, this might be a good candidate for an additional response format.
> (And adding additional formats to the API in a clean way ought to be quite
> easy, see https://github.com/JeroenDeDauw/QueryrAPI/issues/39)
>
> Cheers
>
> --
> Jeroen De Dauw - http://www.bn2vs.com
> Software craftsmanship advocate
> ~=[,,_,,]:3
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikidata mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata
>
>


-- 
Conal Tuohy
http://conaltuohy.com/
@conal_tuohy
+61-466-324297
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