Hello Abe and welcome!
I'm working on
inventaire.io, which might be the
closest existing thing to what you're describing: for the needs of
the book sharing webapp, we maintain an
open
bibliographic database using Wikidata vocabulary and extending
Wikidata for entries that don't match the notability
requirements and/or were automatically generated from data found on
the web and that couldn't be reconciled with existing entities on
Wikidata. We build edition data primarily around ISBNs, which are
part of GTINs. This wasn't built using Wikibase but with an
ad
hoc software (see
repo) as
Wikibase federation wasn't ready at all when we started, and
still
misses some critical pieces today, but we are considering moving
the bibliographic data in a dedicated federated Wikibase instance
at some point. The rest of the data (users, inventories,
transactions, maybe
reviews
in the future) would keep their current form (documents in CouchDB
databases without any relation to the Wikidata data model).
So, answering your question, I don't think Wikidata is the place to
crowdsource data about retail products but I'm convinced a database
doing this should do it using Wikidata vocabulary! And just like we
are glad that the
WikiProject_Books
and
WikiCite
exists to work on a consistent (*
cough* almost *
cough*)
data model on
books that we can reuse within Inventaire, there are several
projects in or around Wikidata with which such a project
could/should work:
- the
WikiObject
sister project proposal: you got to check that, Quico, the main
contributor (in cc) has been doing quite some research on this very
close project
-
Wikidata:WikiProject_Companies
-
Wikidata:WikiProject_Materials
-
OpenFoodFacts,
which also has to deal with GTIN and products properties, and
which
expressed interest in getting more integrated with Wikidata
Also of interest:
-
Open
Product Data, a project that was sharing your idea but
couldn't get the momentum(?)
- the
GoodRelations
ontology
-
OpenCorporates,
unfortunately not so open from what I could tell
I have been dreaming of such a database for a while now (see my (now
old ><) articles
P2P Resources
Management,
Wikidata
and the apt-get of things,
Mapping
resources using open knowledge), and extending Inventaire to
other things that books has always been in the category of the
possible futures, so I would be more than happy to hear more about
any progresses on this :)
Bests,
Le 19/09/2018 à 21:49, Abe Voelker a
écrit :
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
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