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