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On Jul 11, 2012, at 6:23 AM, jmcclure@hypergrove.com wrote:
When you say "Whether some Wikipedia's output is semantically correct is important, but (afaik) has *zero* relationship with Wikidata. And as such is not relevant here" then I feel compelled to point out that an ontology is most certainly envisioned -- wikidata is implementing the SMW Property namespace! Undoubtedly it will use Category: for owl:Class representations, just like SMW. And builtin Datatypes, just like SMW. So, wikidata actually is *100%* concerned with the semantic web.
I agree completely :). Wikidata will most certainly allow MediaWiki sites to more easily output good and properly organized semantic data that is machine readable and follows standards.
I am merely pointing out that, from what I've seen so far (note I am just observing Wikidata, I'm not on their team or actively participate in its development by other means) ..so far, that it is intended to allow including data from a repository. And to allow that free of format constraints.
For example, one popular example used is the population of Berlin. I may want to retrieve the raw number, of formatted according to the user language. Or perhaps I want to output a table in an article with the yearly population numbers of the last 20 years and then add <ref> invocations for the sources as known to Wikidata.
Or perhaps I want an estimate of different sources (some source may indicate the population at 2011-01-01 to be number X, another organization may have a different method and came up with a different number at a different date in 2011). Or a range. Etc. Many variations possible.
And I might add that having semantic output does not require any form or centralization. One can output semantic html with data attributes or whatever microformat right from wikitext (like done on Wikipedia right through the {{Persondata}} template[1]).
And likewise one will be able to output data from Wikidata without having to use a particular format.
That's not to say that there shouldn't be any html view of wikidata by default, that could be a very useful feature. I'll leave that up to someone else more involved to comment about.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Persondata
-- Krinkle