On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 5:36 PM, jmcclure@hypergrove.com wrote:
Hi Lydia,
'We' are people who committed professionally to the SMW (and Halo) approach to enterprise computing and 'we' are clients who have invested in this approach. We'll want to install wikidata-client along with smw to get at infobox data (if such is the ultimate design). We'll want to install wikidata-host to stay current with where all the investment dollars, the technical interest, etc, are flowing.
Yet you assert that smw & wikidata have different target groups (without defining either).
Ok then let me define it more clearly. Wikidata's clear goal is to serve the Wikipedias. Use in other contexts will also be possible and encouraged but Wikipedia is the main target. It is for a project that values references for all the structured data and it is supposed to serve a multi-language audience. SMW is well established and used in professional and non-professional projects outside of Wikipedia. It usually serves smaller wikis and has quite some use in companies for their internal knowledge management. Obviously there is overlap but in the end the projects are distinct enough to co-exist just fine. Markus wrote a long email about this here: http://www.mail-archive.com/semediawiki-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg03369...
However, I believe they are the SAME because their objectives are the same: to integrate structured data into the MW editing/display environment. There's not room for multiple implementations of tools with the same objective.
If you define the goal that broadly then yes it might be the same for both. But this is actually too broad. See above.
In short, my whole push is that, to be most successful, wikidata must consider the already-available or -installed base of technologies and tools.
We are considering them. People like Denny, Jeroen and Markus know SMW and related technology very well and are using this knowledge to influence Wikidata.
That's what reinventing the wheel is all about. It's why God took only 6 days to create the world -- there was no installed base to "accommodate".
john
Cheers Lydia