Hi Nilesh :)
On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 7:50 PM, Nilesh Chakraborty nilesh@nileshc.com wrote:
Hi,
I am a 3rd year undergraduate student of computer science, pursuing my B.Tech degree at RCC Institute of Information Technology. I am proficient in Java, PHP and C#.
Among the project ideas on the GSoC 2013 ideas page, the one particular idea that seemed really interesting to me is developing an Entity Suggester for Wikidata. I want to work on it.
I am passionate about data mining, big data and recommendation engines, therefore this idea naturally appeals to me a lot. I have experience with building music and people recommendation systems, and have worked with Myrrix and Apache Mahout. I recently designed and implemented such a recommendation system and deployed it on a live production site, where I'm interning at, to recommend Facebook users to each other depending upon their interests.
This sounds excellent!
The problem is, the documentation for Wikidata and the Wikibase extension seems pretty daunting to me since I have not ever configured a mediawiki instance or actually used it. (I am on my way to try it out following the instructions at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2013#Where_to_start.) I can easily build a recommendation system and create a web-service or REST based API through which the engine can be trained with existing data, and queried and all. This seems to be a collaborative filtering problem (people who bought x also bought y). It'll be easier if I could get some help about the part where/how I need to integrate it with Wikidata. Also, some sample datasets (csv files?) or schemas (just the column names and data types?) would help a lot, for me to figure this out.
It is important I think that you try to set up a system where you can test what you're working on. If the documentation is not good enough for you to get this running please let me know where you are stuck. Then we need to improve the documentation there. That'll make it a lot easier for others following you :)
I assume you have also already gotten yourself familiar with wikidata.org, browsed around and made a few edits? That should help you get a feeling for why the suggester is so important. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Notes/Data_model_primer is also important to understand for this project.
Let me know if you have more questions or get stuck.
Cheers Lydia
-- Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher Community Communications for Technical Projects
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. Obentrautstr. 72 10963 Berlin www.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.