(This gets a little bit off the topic, but it should still be helpful for the
current discussion. But if we want to discuss a more general data management
architecture for MW, then it might be sensible to make a new thread ;-)
On Freitag, 28. Mai 2010, Michael Dale wrote:
More important than file_metadata and page asset
metadata working with
the same db table backed, its important that you can query export all
the properties in the same way.
Within SMW you already have some "special" properties like pagelinks,
langlinks, category properties etc, that are not stored the same as the
other SMW page properties ... The SMW system should name-space all
these file_metadata properties along with all the other structured data
available and enable universal querying / RDF exporting all the
structured wiki data. This way file_metadata would just be one more
special data type with its own independent tables. ...
SMW should abstract the data store so it works with the existing
structured tables. I know this was already done for categories correct?
More recent versions of SMW actually do no longer use MW's category table for
this, mostly to improve query performance.
[In a nutshell: SMW properties can refer to non-existing pages, and the full
version of SMW therefore has its own independent page id management (because
we want to use numerical IDs for all pages that are used as property values,
whether or not they exist). Using IDs everywhere improves our query
performance and reduces SQL query size, but it creates a barrier for including
MW table data since more joins would be needed to translate between IDs. This
is one reason SMW Light will not support queries: it uses a much simpler DB
layout and less code, but the resulting DB is not as suitable for querying.]
Was enabling this for all the other links and usage
tables explored?
Having a unified view on the variety of MediaWiki data (page metadata, user-
edited content data, file metadata, ...) would of course be great. But
accomplishing this would require a more extensive effort than our little SMW
extension. What SMW tries to provide for now is just a way of storing user-
edited data in a wiki (and also for displaying/exporting it).
Of course SMW already has a PHP abstraction for handling the property-value
pairs that were added to some page, and this abstraction layer completely
hides the underlying DB tables. This allows us to make more data accessible
even if it is in other tables, and even to change the DB layout of our custom
tables if required. You are right that such an abstraction could be extended
to cover more of the native data of MediaWiki, so that data dumps can include
it as well.
I think this idea is realistic, and I hope that SMW helps to accomplish this
in some future. Yet, this is not a small endeavour given that not even most
basic data management features are deployed on the big Wikimedia projects
today. To get there, we first need a code review regarding security and
performance, and so for the moment we are pressed to reduce features and to
shrink your code base. This is why we are currently building the "Light"
version that only covers data input (without link syntax extensions), storage,
look-up, and basic export/dump. For this step, I really think that sharing a
data table with the EXIF extension would make sense, since the data looks very
similar and a more complex DB layout is not necessary for the initial goals.
We can always consider using more tables if the need arises.
But I would be very happy if there were more people who want to make concrete
progress toward the goal you describe. Meanwhile, we are planning in smaller
steps ;-)
This also make sense from an architecture perspective, where
file_metadata is tied to the file asset and SMW properties are tied to
the asset wiki description page. This way you know you don't have to
think about that subset of metadata properties on page updates since
they are tied to the file asset not the wiki page propriety driven from
structured user input. Likewise uploading a new version of the file
would not touch the page data tables.
Right, it might be useful to distinguish the internal handles (and external
URIs) of the Image page and of the image file. But having a dedicated
meta_schema value for user-edited properties of the page might suffice to
accomplish this on the DB level. I am fairly agnostic about the details, but I
have a tendency to wait with developing a more sophisticated DB layout until
we have some usage statistics from the initial deployment to guide us.
-- Markus
Markus Krötzsch wrote:
Hi Bawolff,
interesting project! I am currently preparing a "light" version of SMW
that does something very similar, but using wiki-defined properties for
adding metadata to normal pages (in essence, SMW is an extension to store
and retrieve page metadata for properties defined in the wiki -- like XMP
for MW pages; though our data model is not quite as sophisticated ;-).
The use cases for this light version are just what you describe: simple
retrieval (select) and basic inverse searches. The idea is to thus have a
solid foundation for editing and viewing data, so that more complex
functions like category intersections or arbitrary metadata conjunctive
queries would be done on external servers based on some data dump.
It would be great if the table you design could be used for such metadata
as well. As you say, XMP already requires extensibility by design, so it
might not be too much work to achieve this. SMW properties are usually
identified by pages in the wiki (like categories), so page titles can be
used to refer to them. This just requires that the meta_name field is
long enough to hold MW page title names. Your meta_schema could be used
to separate wiki properties from other XMP properties. SMW Light does not
require nested structures, but they could be interesting for possible
extensions (the full SMW does support one-level of nesting for making
compound values).
Two things about your design I did not completely understand (maybe just
because I don't know much about XMP):
(1) You use mediumblob for values. This excludes range searches for
numerical image properties ("Show all images of height 1000px or more")
which do not seem to be overly costly if a suitable schema were used. If
XMP has a typing scheme for property values anyway, then I guess one
could find the numbers and simply put them in a table where the value
field is a number. Is this use case out of scope for you, or do you think
the cost of reading from two tables too high? One could also have an
optional helper field "meta_numvalue" used for sorting/range-SELECT when
it is known from the input that the values that are searched for are
numbers.
(2) Each row in your table specifies property (name and schema), type,
and the additional meta_qualifies. Does this mean that one XMP property
can have values of many different types and with different flags for
meta_qualifies? Otherwise it seems like a lot of redundant data. Also,
one could put stuff like type and qualifies into the mediumblob value
field if they are closely tied together (I guess, when searching for some
value, you implicitly specify what type the data you search for has, so
it is not problematic to search for the value + type data at once). Maybe
such considerations could simplify the table layout, and also make it
less specific to XMP.
But overall, I am quite excited to see this project progressing. Maybe we
could have some more alignment between the projects later on (How about
combining image metadata and custom wiki metadata about image pages in
queries? :-) but for GSoC you should definitely focus on your core goals
and solve this task as good as possible.
Best regards,
Markus
On Freitag, 28. Mai 2010, bawolff wrote:
Hi all,
For those who don't know me, I'm one of the GSOC students this year.
My mentor is ^demon, and my project is to enhance support for metadata
in uploaded files. Similar to the recent thread on interwiki
transclusions, I'd thought I'd ask for comments about what I propose
to do.
Currently metadata is stored in img_metadata field of the image table
as a serialized php array. Well this works fine for the primary use
case - listing the metadata in a little box on the image description
page, its not very flexible. Its impossible to do queries like get a
list of images with some specific metadata property equal to some
specific value, or get a list of images ordered by what software
edited them.
So as part of my project I would like to move the metadata to its own
table. However I think the structure of the table will need to be a
little more complicated then just <page id>, <name>, <value> triples,
since ideally it would be able to store XMP metadata, which can
contain nested structures. XMP metadata is pretty much the most
complex metadata format currently popular (for metadata stored inside
images anyways), and can store pretty much all other types of
metadata. Its also the only format that can store multi-lingual
content, which is a definite plus as those commons folks love their
languages. Thus I think it would be wise to make the table store
information in a manner that is rather close to the XMP data model.
So basically my proposed metadata table looks like:
*meta_id - primary key, auto-incrementing integer
*meta_page - foreign key for page_id - what image is this for
*meta_type - type of entry - simple value or some sort of compound
structure. XMP supports ordered/unordered lists, associative array
type structures, alternate array's (things like arrays listing the
value of the property in different languages).
*meta_schema - xmp uses different namespaces to prevent name
collisions. exif properties have their own namespace, IPTC properties
have their own namespace, etc
*meta_name - The name of the property
*meta_value - the value of the property (or null for some compound
things, see below)
*meta_ref - a reference to a meta_id of a different row for nested
structures, or null if not applicable (or 0 perhaps)
*meta_qualifies - boolean to denote if this property is a qualifier
(in XMP there are normal properties and qualifiers)
(see
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Bawolff/metadata_table for a
longer explanation of the table structure)
Now, before everyone says eww nested structures in a db are
inefficient and what not, I don't think its that bad (however I'm new
to the whole scalability thing, so hopefully someone more
knowledgeable than me will confirm or deny that).
The XMP specification specifically says that there is no artificial
limit on nesting depth, however in general practise its not nested
very deeply. Furthermore in most cases the tree structure can be
safely ignored. Consider:
*Use-case 1 (primary usecase), displaying a metadata info box on an
image page. Most of the time that'd be translating specific name and
values into html table cells. The tree structure is totally
unnecessary. for example the exif property DateTimeOriginal can only
appear once per image (also it can only appear at the root of the tree
structure but thats beside the point). There is no need to reconstruct
the tree, just look through all the props for the one you need. If the
tree structure is important it can be reconstructed on the php side,
and would typically be only the part of the tree that is relevant, not
the entire nested structure.
*Use-case 2 (secondary usecase). Get list of images ordered by some
property starting at foo. or get list of images where property bar =
baz. In this case its a simple select. It does not matter where in the
tree structure the property is.
Thus, all the nestedness of XMP is preserved (So we could re-output it
into xmp form if we so desired), and there is no evil joining the
metadata table with itself over and over again (or at all), which from
what i understand, self-joining to reconstruct nested structures is
what makes them inefficient in databases.
I also think this schema would be future proof because it can store
pretty much all metadata we can think of. We can also extend it with
custom properties we make up that are guaranteed to not conflict with
anything (The X in xmp is for extensible).
As a side-note, based on my rather informal survey of commons (aka the
couple people who happened to be on #wikimedia-commons at that moment)
another use-case people think would be cool and useful is metadata
intersections, and metadata-category intersections. I'm not planning
to do this as part of my project, as I believe that would have
performance issues. However doing a metadata table like this does
leave the possibility open for people to do such intersection things
on the toolserver or in a DPL-like extension.
I'd love to get some feedback on this. Is this a reasonable approach
for me to take on this.
Thanks for reading.
--
-bawolff
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--
Markus Krötzsch <markus(a)semantic-mediawiki.org>
* Personal page:
http://korrekt.org
* Semantic MediaWiki:
http://semantic-mediawiki.org
* Semantic Web textbook:
http://semantic-web-book.org
--