Hi Chris
AS someone who as worked with the old Wikidata code, I must say I very much prefer to start over. The old code is convoluted and scales poorly.
The approach of the new Wikibase extension is much cleaner. Some advantages:
* we can use the storage and versioning facilities of mediawiki without any changes, and still have efficient mechanisms for querying data.
* We can easily deal with complex, nested data structures
* We have a powerful but well-defined data model for representing concepts ("items" in wikibase terminology). Among other things, source references for any claim are an integral part of the system.
* Properties and data schemans can be maintained on-wiki, without any need for changes to the configuration or database.
* We are free to implement a federation mechanism (updates for "client" sites) the way that best fits our needs.
We have considered both Wikidata/OmegaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki as a base to build on, but decided to implement the core of Wikibase from scratch, mainly for the above reasons.
-- daniel
On 10.05.2012 11:28, Chris Tophe wrote:
Denny Vrandečić <denny.vrandecic@...> writes:
- OmegaWiki is geared towards replacing the Wiktionaries. Thus OmegaWiki talks
about words and their translations, the meaning of the words being given by their defined meaning.
Actually, yes, this is what OmegaWiki is about, but OmegaWiki is only one possible implementation of Wikidata.
The "Wikidata extension" is in fact more generally about replacing a standard wiki page, where you write everything in one field, with a structured data wiki page, where you have many fields of different types (text, checkboxes, comboboxes, etc. we have all this at OmegaWiki), and where each field is stored in a separate database table.
So, a list of languages/translations in omegawiki could be easily replaced by a list of languages/interwikilink.
However, I must admit that the Wikidata code is very complex and poorly documented, so that it might be actually faster to do everything from scratch for your needs. Furthermore, since OmegaWiki has been the only implementation of Wikidata, some work would be needed to separate what is actually OW-specific from the rest (which is why I am interested in the other direction of contribution, i.e. adapting Wikibase for OmegaWiki, if this is possible).
I'll try connecting to chatzilla on evenings or week-ends.
Cheers, Christophe
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