Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation since 2006

meta.wikimedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 51 posts

Re: Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation since 2006

#31

Post by gioele »

icebraining wrote: post #6
manuletroll wrote: post #2

This might be very interesting if it's implemented in a sane way. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a very widely-adopted standard in the world of open data for now..

RDF has been adopted by some pretty big data websites, and apparently that's one of the formats they plan to support: The data will be exported in different formats, especially RDF, SKOS, and JSON. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Technical_proposal

Technically unsound: RDF is a relationship model and a meta-model (think XML Infoset), SKOS is a vocabulary (think XHTML) and JSON is a serialization format (think XML or RDF/N3).

The question is which schema, ontology or vocabulary will they use to express their data? Who will develop it? Or will they reuse other vocabularies? How do they intend to extend them? If they are RDF based, how will they project to JSON given that there are a dozen different conversion methods?

How can that document not cite DBpedia, a project that is extracting structured data from Wikipedia infoboxes and has years of experience in doing that?

The fact that their technical proposal document is quite confused about these ground technologies makes me fear that there is more wishful thinking than past experiences.

Re: Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation since 2006

#32

Post by Alex3917 »

david927 wrote: post #25
Alex3917 wrote: post #5

This is actually a startup idea I've had for a while now. It's a great idea in theory, but it's very tricky in practice. Facts have a mysterious way of vanishing if you look closely enough at them, and the raw numbers themselves don't actually tell you anything. The part that's actually interesting is: - The methodology behind the numbers - What we think is most likely the case based on the evidence available - How e…

You couldn't be more right, and I think the key here is: How each fact connects with other facts If there were no operations, math would just be numbers on their own -- and what fun is that? The problem is that the relations turn it into the Semantic Web, and after trying and failing to crack that nut for so long, everyone is turned off of it. Which is too bad, because what was failing was the approach. Trying severa…

"The problem is that the relations turn it into the Semantic Web"

Not really. Assuming there are only four or five simple relationships like "Knowing fact X is necessary to understand fact Y", then the whole system isn't much more complicated than trackbacks for blog posts.

Re: Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation since 2006

#33

Post by jasonkolb »

Now this is interesting (from the page):

"Wikidata is a secondary database. Wikidata will not simply record statements, but it will also record their sources, thus also allowing to reflect the diversity of knowledge available in reality."

That sounds pretty cool to me, because you could potentially upload probabalistic data from statistical analysis. If they make this so that you can tell how reliable the source is, you could upload information that's accurate to a given degree of probability.

It would be very interesting if you could version data by reliability, so that less-reliable data could eventually be replaced by definitive data. This is an achilles heel of current data modeling systems.

Re: Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation since 2006

#34

Post by jasonkolb »

Nice to see they're going to support SPARQL:

"O3.1. Develop and prepare a SPARQL endpoint to the data. Even though a full-fledged SPARQL endpoint to the data will likely be impossible, we can provide a SPARQL endpoints that allows certain patterns of queries depending on the expressivity supported by the back end."

I see the semantic web slowly realizing its actual purpose (which is not related to semantic natural language processing but rather linking data).

Re: Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation since 2006

#35

Post by jasonkolb »

Alex3917 wrote: post #29
mkr-hn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+heavy+is+earth Click "Source information."

That isn't a list of references, that's just a list of suggested reading. In fact it's not even guaranteed that the any of the facts on that page come from any of those sources. It's basically just showing a list of books that come up when you Google for the question.

Interesting... so they're making the calculations internally but not telling you how they got there then, right? So you really can't use wolfram alpha as a reliable source for anything?

Re: Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation since 2006

#36

Post by david927 »

Alex3917 wrote: post #32
david927 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You couldn't be more right, and I think the key here is: How each fact connects with other facts If there were no operations, math would just be numbers on their own -- and what fun is that? The problem is that the relations turn it into the Semantic Web, and after trying and failing to crack that nut for so long, everyone is turned off of it. Which is too bad, because what was failing was the approach. Trying severa…

"The problem is that the relations turn it into the Semantic Web" Not really. Assuming there are only four or five simple relationships like "Knowing fact X is necessary to understand fact Y", then the whole system isn't much more complicated than trackbacks for blog posts.

If it was that simple, it would already have been solved. The problem is that relations are for any data point and they can be one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many; and mixes metadata with data seamlessly. It's a hard problem, make no mistake, but completely solvable. I have an approach I'm working on that I'll email you, if you're interested.

Re: Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation since 2006

#37

Post by roc »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #30
roc wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why you couldn't have a database of facts under CC-BY-SA. You can't copyright individual facts, but you absolutely can copyright a collection of facts as a collection. [1] I would think the more-pressing problem would be the 'viral' nature of the 'share alike' restriction when it came to API use. Attribution would also seem to be thorny and difficult to police, but not intractable. [1] e.g. I can make a p…

But being able to legally take all the data out and making your own database (or other thing) with it (which you state is fine) is exactly what makes CC-BY-SA pointless/inapplicable to databases of open data. See this discussion of why CC-BY-SA is unsuitable for OpenStreetMap (which mentions the case law on phone books you refer to): http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/Why_CC_BY-SA_is_Un... Wikipedia says this…

It seems to me the confusion is over what OpenStreetMap wants to control and what copyright allows them to control.

The 'shortcomings' of CC-BY-SA noted in your first link seem to boil down to use cases involving chunks of data that simply do not qualify for copyright. Thus, by definition, no copyright license could behave any differently than any other in determining what can and can't be done with those chunks of data.

A Terms of Use agreement (and enforcement) could do more, but the particular copyright license is simply moot.

Re: Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation since 2006

#38

Post by Alex3917 »

david927 wrote: post #36
Alex3917 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The problem is that the relations turn it into the Semantic Web" Not really. Assuming there are only four or five simple relationships like "Knowing fact X is necessary to understand fact Y", then the whole system isn't much more complicated than trackbacks for blog posts.

If it was that simple, it would already have been solved. The problem is that relations are for any data point and they can be one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many; and mixes metadata with data seamlessly. It's a hard problem, make no mistake, but completely solvable. I have an approach I'm working on that I'll email you, if you're interested.

Sure, send me an email.

Re: Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation since 2006

#39

Post by Alex3917 »

jasonkolb wrote: post #35
Alex3917 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't a list of references, that's just a list of suggested reading. In fact it's not even guaranteed that the any of the facts on that page come from any of those sources. It's basically just showing a list of books that come up when you Google for the question.

Interesting... so they're making the calculations internally but not telling you how they got there then, right? So you really can't use wolfram alpha as a reliable source for anything?

Correct. It's conceivable that you could find a secondary source in their reading list that links to a primary source, but in practice going through their list of sources would be much slower than just doing the search yourself, meaning that site has zero utility in practice. (Assuming you care about the information you're getting being true, if you're writing a middle school paper about penguins then it probably gives you enough plausible deniability for having done the work, but for anything else there isn't much point.)

Re: Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation since 2006

#40

Post by john61 »

debacle wrote: post #18

My concern for the potential for abuse in this project is much greater than that of wikipedia. How is wikimedia going to ensure that there are no malicious edits to this data? Any changes will almost certainly need stringent peer review. Edit: As an afterthought, it would make a lot of sense to manage it like a git repository, where someone could submit a pull request for data changes, and then some subgroup or a tru…

Openstreetmap has the same problem and it handles it well.
Post reply on HN