Hi Paul!
I understand your frustration, but let me put a few things into perspective.
For reference: I'm employed by WMDE and work on wikibase/wikidata. I have been
working on MediaWiki since 2005, and am being payed for it since 2008.
Am 20.02.2015 um 19:14 schrieb Paul Houle:
I am not an academic. The people behind Wikidata are.
To the extend that most of us have some college degree. The only "full"
academic
involved is Markus Krötzsch, who together with Denny Vrandecic developed many of
the concepts behind Wikidata. He acts as an advisor to the Wikidata project, but
doesn't have any formal position.
Oh, we also have a group of students working on their bachelor project with us.
I first heard about Wikidata at SemTech in San
Francisco and I was told very
directly that they were not interested in working with anybody who was
experienced with putting data from generic database in front of users because
they had worked so hard to get academic positions and get a grant from the Allen
Institute and it is more cost-effective and more compatible with academic
advancement to hire a bunch of young people who don't know anything but will
follow orders.
Auch. Working with such people would be a drag. Luckily, we have an awesome team
of full blooded programmers. Not that we get everything right, or done in time...
RDF* and SPARQL* do not come from an academic
background but from a commercial
organization that expects to make money by satisfying people's needs and it is
being supported by a number of other commercial organizations. See
You'll be happy to hear that we are working with high priority to finally
provide full query functionality. We are still evaluating options (WMF's Nik and
Stas have been visiting the WMDE office for this, just this week - have a safe
trip home, guys!), but the current favorite is, in fact, BlazeGraph, formerly
BigData, by the people who came up with RDF* and RDR. If we end up using that,
chances are good that we will be exposing a SPARQL endpoint directly.
We may still find a deal breaker though, so no promise. Another option would be
Neo4J, using a graph oriented mapping. We could still expose SPARQL (building
upon Gremlin, IIRC), but I suspect that we'd probably rather expose something
more domain specific, perhaps based on Magnus' WDQ syntax, that operates
directly on the graph.
This is something that builds on everything successful
about RDF and SPARQL and
adds the "missing links" that it takes to implement data wikis. If somebody
was
starting Wikidata today or if the kind of billionaire who buys sports teams the
way I might buy a game console wanted to fund an effort to keep Freebase going,
RDF*/SPARQL* is the way to do it.
I still stand by the decision not to use a triple store as the primary storage
for wikidata, for various reasons (MediaWiki integration, especially versioning,
being among the most important ones).
But I'm all for mapping our internal model to RDF, and exposing a SPARQL
endpoint, if we can do that in a reliable manner with the available resources.
I'd rather have limited query functionality with five nines uptime than a SPARQL
endpoint that is down half the time.
Speaking of mapping to RDF: Have you read
<http://korrekt.org/papers/Wikidata-RDF-export-2014.pdf>?
Wikidata is playing to whims of a few rich
people and it could disappear at any time when those people get tired of it or
decide they have what they want and don't want to make it any easier for
competitors to follow them.
Wikidata development and hosting is funded by donations to Wikimedia, like all
Wikimedia projects. The first year of development was indeed funded by large
companies and trusts (AI2, Google, and the Moore Foundation), but to my
knowledge they never tried to influence our decisions.
We have never had academic funding. I don't think we are going to say "no"
if we
can get any, though.
The trouble is that most people interested in open
data seem to think their time
is worth nothing and other people's time is worth nothing and aren't interested
in paying even a small amount for services so the producers throw stuff that
almost works over the wall. I don't think it would be all that difficult for me
to do for Wikidata what I did for Freebase but I am not doing it because you
aren't going to pay for it.
If you mail me an application/offer, I'm happy to forward and, depending on
content, champion it. Wikimedia doesn't pay as well as big tech companies
(Wikimedia operates on a shoe string budget, compared to other sites with
upwards of 100k hits per second), but the pay isn't shoddy either. Come and
visit! Let's talk!
--
Daniel Kinzler
Senior Software Developer
Wikimedia Deutschland
Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.