Hey,

We heard there’s work on a common JSON format that – in contrast to the current JSON format – will be standardized and could thus be used for our purpose. Are there plans to implement the new format any time soon and is that format the way to go for us?

We have two formats at this point and are not planning on adding new ones. One format is our internal format, which we use in our data access layer (to store entity pages). You should never interact with this format. The second format is out external one, which is for usage in the web API and other parts of our presentation layer. Unfortunately the database dumps we currently provide and are used by a lot of people, contain the internal format. Since these are the only dumps we currently have, people are forced to deal with this internal format. This is what will change - we will provide dumps in the external format rather then the internal one.

This means you already are able to obtain entities in the external format from out web API. And if you are making an extension to Wikibase, you can get the entities as PHP objects, and not deal with their deserialization at all.

We are also working on moving our serialization and deserialization code for our DataModel into a Wikibase-independent component. This is in very early stages at this point and is likely not going to be done any time soon. https://github.com/wmde/WikibaseDataModelSerialization

Cheers

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Jeroen De Dauw
http://www.bn2vs.com
Don't panic. Don't be evil. ~=[,,_,,]:3
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