Wikidata-tech January 2015

wikidata-tech@lists.wikimedia.org

11 participants
7 discussions

MediaWiki API - wbsearchentities - partial match
by Almer Bolatov 20 Jan '15

20 Jan '15

Hello dear wikidata list participants, I use a MediaWiki API <https://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php> to query for Wikidata items. I faced a problem when using 'wbsearchentities' action. I have a query string 'Blue Angel' and I need to find the entities that have a title containing this query string, in particular entity with property id equal to 'Q158047'. But to find it I have to search for '*The* Blue Angel'. I tried to increase the limit of maximal number results up to 50, but still entity Q158047 does not appear in the resultant list. Is there a way to have partial matches? Thanks, Almer

2 1

Globe coordinates precision question (technical)
by Markus Krötzsch 13 Jan '15

13 Jan '15

Hi, Here is the technical counterpart of the question on globe coordinates I just sent to wikidata-l: """ Which of the following statements are most accurate given the technical roadmap of Wikibase? (1a) Wikibase will continue to support arbitrary precision values for coordinates, and the UI will be extended so people can actually enter them. (1b) Wikibase will restrict the set of supported precision values for coordinates to those already supported in the UI. Other values are considered an error that will have to be fixed in the future. (2a) Null values for precision are an error that should be fixed in the data. Wikibase will reject such data in the future. (2b) Null values for precision have a meaning. It is as follows (please explain): ... """ It would really be useful for third parties to know which way this is going. Thanks, Markus

5 10

Question on definition of Wikidata query service
by Peter F. Patel-Schneider 13 Jan '15

13 Jan '15

Hi: Is there a definition of what queries against Wikidata are supposed to return? In particular, how will queries interact with P1647 (subproperty of) and similiar aspect of Wikidata? peter

3 3

RDF: improving wb_terms performance
by Daniel Kinzler 12 Jan '15

12 Jan '15

I have filed an RFC about ways to improve the performance of the wb_terms table (or rather, how to replace it with something that works better). https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T86530 -- Daniel Kinzler Senior Software Developer Wikimedia Deutschland Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.

1 0

RFC: Unit localization
by Daniel Kinzler 12 Jan '15

12 Jan '15

I have files an RFC about how units for quantities should be localized during input and rendering: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T86528 -- Daniel Kinzler Senior Software Developer Wikimedia Deutschland Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.

1 0

Next steps for complex queries on the cluster
by Nikolas Everett 11 Jan '15

11 Jan '15

Hello wikidata-tech! tl/dr: we're going to move forward building a query service against Titan/Cassandra rather than OrientDB or ArangoDB or anything else. We finally finished up the exploratory phase of building a Wikidata Query Service we can run on the cluster. As a reminder, these were our goals: 1. Horizontal scalability for handling more queries and large data sets 2. Active user community outside of WMF The system has to be able to answer questions like "find me all the humans without a date of death born more than 115 years ago" and "list the 10 biggest cities in Europe with female mayors" or "find me all writers who are not authors". We're perfectly happy if its something we have to hack on, but we don't want to be the _only_ ones using it. That lands you in lsearchd like situations where the open source world moves in a different direction than you do and then no one knows how to support your software. You become afraid to restart it, much less release new versions of it. (BTW, Chad just pulled the last remaining trickle of traffic from it today, party!) So we identified three good candidates: Titan (backed by Cassandra), OrientDB and ArangoDB. We prototyped against both Titan and OrientDB and both worked pretty well. We didn't have time to prototype against ArangoDB and we also had communications mixup with upstream. Anyway, when it came down to it we had two working prototypes so taking time to build a third felt a bit redundant. You can see much of our notes here <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/Indexing>. The trouble with two working prototypes is that you can't just flip a coin to pick one. I guess you could, but instead we made a spreadsheet <https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/spreadsheets/d/1MXikljoSUVP77w7JKf9…>. We rated Titan and OrientDB in 25ish categories, weighted the categories, and added the results and picked a winner. The process wasn't perfect, but it was a thing of beauty to watch four people simultaneously edit the spreadsheet, leaving comments explaining most of the numbers. Titan eventually won by a fairly wide margin so we're proceeding with work on it. I expect lots of people will have comments. Please reply here and/or comment directly on the spreadsheet. Everyone in WMF can leave comments on the sheet and most interested parties at WMDE have been given rights to do so. I'm loath to set the document to world comment-able for some reason. I don't think its particularly likely we'll end up reworking the spreadsheet to the point where Titan isn't still the victor, but if we do lets try to do so quickly so we can stop work on it. We've started to try and use our workboard <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/891/> to keep track of work left to do. The next big steps are: * Draw up an architecture so we know how many and what kind of servers ask ops for * To port what we have from Titan 0.5.0 to Titan 0.9.0-M1 so we're on the most current development line (also, 0.9.0-M1 supports reverse-i-search, and who can live without that?) * To implement incremental updates * Start prototyping a public query API So, any questions? Note: I've also sent this email to WMF-ops but can't add both lists to the same conversation because ops email are moderated and any conversation here would create a moderation nightmare. Nik

4 4

Reconciling with Wikidata (was Freebase)
by Thad Guidry 07 Jan '15

07 Jan '15

Hello New Freebase :) I have updated the OpenRefine reconciliation redo task to support reconciling against Wikidata here: https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/issues/805 However, in our inspection of your API, would could not find a close approximate for something that the Freebase API had, which was OUTPUT of Properties for an Entity / Item. Looking at this query syntax: https://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php?action=wbsearchentities&search=Valve&lan… I would ideally like to have a way to output additional metadata or properties and their values "for each item". Is there a way to do so ? Or is a second request always needed to query the ids (a pain point)? Thanks in advance, Thad +ThadGuidry <https://www.google.com/+ThadGuidry>

3 5

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

Wikidata-tech January 2015