Hello,
I was checking out Wikidata and was wondering if it
would be a good fit for a website I wanted to make to
crowdsource data about retail products, storing properties
like product name, description, UPC/GTIN, MPN,
manufacturer, color, size, and so on.
I take it that due to Wikidata's Wikipedia notability
requirement I'd have to operate my own Wikibase instance
separate from Wikidata? In that case, is it still possible
to integrate with Wikidata's ontologies, or do I have to
have my own completely separate ontology from scratch (I'd
hate to have to reinvent the real basic properties and
constraints)? Are there similar projects I could look at
to get an idea how to partially-fork Wikidata in this way?
Another thing I'm wondering about is how I would
integrate data that wouldn't necessarily fit into the
product data ontology, like customer reviews of the
product, or sale offers (offers having their own
properties like price, availability, condition, and
hyperlink to seller's site) - things that aren't inherent
characteristics of the item and change often. I was
wondering if it would be easier to have a "wrapper"
website that stores this data separate, while still
integrating with the core product data from Wikibase. Does
anyone have any experience or references to projects doing
an integration like that? I'm wondering what the easiest
way to integrate the two would be - connect directly to
the MySQL database, sync databases with hooks, SPARQL,
etc.
Also, some of the data for this website I'd wish to
populate by crawling online retail stores and
manufacturers and performing edits with a bot. Some of
these sites provide
schema.org metadata, so I was
wondering if that makes integration with Wikidata/Wikibase
any easier, or do I still have to do some kind of manual
mapping process between the two.
Thanks for your patience with this braindump as I'm new
to Wikidata and still trying to wrap my head around
things. I did the Wikidata tutorials, messed around with a
local Wikibase install using Docker Compose, and a lot of
clicking around Wikidata and reading about ontologies but
it feels like I've just barely scratched the surface!
Thank you,
Abe Voelker