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Json-wikipedia

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Re: Json-wikipedia

#11
post #10
post #9

Why would I need the dump in JSON? XML is for sure uglier but at least there are efficient SAX parsers.

I would like to know this as well. What is gained by using this tool... converting to JSON?

JSON is cool and hip.

More seriously, it has been gaining popularity because of it's direct relationship to built-in structures in most programming languages.

For example: XML doesn't have a concept of arrays, but accomplishes storing collections in it's own special way. It's up to the parser to determine how this should be referenced and interacted-with, while with JSON there's no question: it's an array.

Re: Json-wikipedia

#12
post #11
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to know this as well. What is gained by using this tool... converting to JSON?

JSON is cool and hip. More seriously, it has been gaining popularity because of it's direct relationship to built-in structures in most programming languages. For example: XML doesn't have a concept of arrays, but accomplishes storing collections in it's own special way. It's up to the parser to determine how this should be referenced and interacted-with, while with JSON there's no question: it's an array.

For example, now I know for a fact I can easily manipulate Wikipedia's data dump using Python thanks to this JSON change.

    import json

    js = json.loads(wikidump)
That's it. The only reason it's so simple is thanks to this JSON conversion.

XML? No clue how to manipulate it properly. I could figure it out of course, but now I don't have to. JSON + Python just works™.

Re: Json-wikipedia

#14
post #2

What about DBPedia http://dbpedia.org/page/The_Shining_(film) ? That's available as JSON, and much larger community/effort behind it.

Hi, I'm the author of Json-Wikipedia. It's different from DB-Pedia. DBPedia converts the semistructured data containined in the infoboxes in rdf triples, while Json-Wikipedia converts ALL the content of the page (text, infoboxes, links) into a JSON object. I did this because I need some features that were not available on dbpedia (e.g., the whole text of an article, all the anchors referring to an article etc etc). Also Json-Wikipedia simplifies the processing of a Wikipedia Dump on Hadoop.

Re: Json-wikipedia

#15
post #6

So, does it parse the markdown of the text as well? I could not quite get it from the documentation. It would be quite exciting if it could - the markdown is notoriously complex, and creates a lot of problem if all you want is te body of text (e.g. for training a machine learning algorithm).

Wikipedia articles are not written in markdown but in wikicode. Wikicode is much more complex to parse, but allows more complex formatting. You may be looking for the word 'markup' which is a general term that included markdown, HTML, wikicode, bbcode etc. I doubt this library parses the wikicode. What format would it parse it into? As matthewarkin said, there is a Wikipedia API to convert wikicode into HTML.

It does that indeed! It will process a field paragraph, containing a list of parsed paragraphs in the article, as simple UTF8 text. Lists and Tables are collected in separated fields, have a look to the Article object. For the wikicode parsing I relied on the JWPL Library http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/software/jwpl/

Re: Json-wikipedia

#16
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JSON is cool and hip. More seriously, it has been gaining popularity because of it's direct relationship to built-in structures in most programming languages. For example: XML doesn't have a concept of arrays, but accomplishes storing collections in it's own special way. It's up to the parser to determine how this should be referenced and interacted-with, while with JSON there's no question: it's an array.

For example, now I know for a fact I can easily manipulate Wikipedia's data dump using Python thanks to this JSON change. import json js = json.loads(wikidump) That's it. The only reason it's so simple is thanks to this JSON conversion. XML? No clue how to manipulate it properly. I could figure it out of course, but now I don't have to. JSON + Python just works™.

yes, and also it makes easy to manipulate the dump using Hadoop, and retrieving some values for all the article using jq http://stedolan.github.io/jq/, could you do the same with XML? Btw You can find a little sample of the dump here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4663256/tmp/json-wikiped...
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