Hi folks,
I'm working on a project to document (with the help of Wikidata of course!) different kinds of "digital tools" from a user experience point of view. You have all kinds of digital tools: smartphone app, Windows program, website, Software as a Service, software you have to install yourself on a server, with a Docker image, etc.
What I want is a universal property to differentiate the experience offered by these tools and in particular to be able to say if they are easy to install/launch/open. Basically I want to answer the question "what do I need to use that tool"?
The platform property [1] is not really satisfactory, first of because it is limited to the concept of computing platform [2] which in theory does not allow the use of "world wide web" as a value for example. And saying a software is "web" does not allow to differentiate between a website — such as OpenStreetMap — and a software you have to install on a server — such as Discourse. I thought of adding a "self-hosting" property to describe the possibility of hosting the tool on your own server but it seems too narrow. I have found nothing similar on Wikidata (the Wikipedia article itself is very poor [3]).
A discussion as part of the Informatics/Software WikiProject [4] has given me the idea for a one-size-fits-all solution: adding a "requires" property, which in the context of a software could be used to say "X software requires Y operating system", "X software requires Z hardware" or even "X software requires an installation". The "depends on software" property exists [5] but is obviously still too limited. The "requires" property could also be used outside of the software context, similarly to the "uses" property [6]
What do you think?
[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P400 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing_platform [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-premises_software [4] See end of paragraph: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:WikiProject_Informatics/Software... [5] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1547 [6] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P2283