Apologies for cross-posting from wikidata-l, but this may be of relevance to readers of this list.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dan Garry dgarry@wikimedia.org Date: 7 September 2015 at 15:29 Subject: Announcing the release of the Wikidata Query Service To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org
The Discovery Department at the Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to announce the release of the Wikidata Query Service https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikidata_query_service! You can find the interface for the service at https://query.wikidata.org.
The Wikidata Query Service is designed to let users run queries on the data contained in Wikidata. The service uses SPARQL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARQL as the query language. You can see some example queries in the user manual https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikidata_query_service/User_Manual.
Right now, the service is still in beta. This means that our goal https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2015-16_Q2_Goals#Wikidata_Query_Service is to monitor of the service usage and collect feedback about what people think should be next. To do that, we've created the Wikidata Query Service dashboard https://searchdata.wmflabs.org/wdqs/ to track usage of the service, and we're in the process https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T111403 of setting up a feedback mechanism for users of the service. Once we've got monitored the usage of the service for a while and got user feedback, we'll decide on what's next for development of the service.
If you have any feedback, suggestions, or comments, please do send an email to the Discovery Department's public mailing list, wikimedia-search@lists.wikimedia.org.
Thanks, Dan
Dan Garry wrote:
The Discovery Department at the Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to announce the release of the Wikidata Query Service https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikidata_query_service! You can find the interface for the service at https://query.wikidata.org.
The Wikidata Query Service is designed to let users run queries on the data contained in Wikidata. The service uses SPARQL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARQL as the query language. You can see some example queries in the user manual https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikidata_query_service/User_Manual.
Thanks for this e-mail. Wikidata query service looks neat.
When will be this type of functionality be available on-wiki? I have a vague memory that some type of query service similar to this one was/is intended to be used to allow arbitrary access to Wikidata data from/on Wikimedia wikis such as the English Wikipedia.
MZMcBride
Hi!
When will be this type of functionality be available on-wiki? I have a
Well, since it has REST endpoint (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikidata_query_service/User_Manual#SPARQL_end...) that can be called from JS or PHP or anything in between, technically anytime beginning now :) but I guess it depends on the meaning of "available". It is still beta, so some changes and tweaks and stability challenges possible, but otherwise it is ready for use.
That said, I'm not sure how exactly wikis such as the English Wikipedia may be using this engine - that's something we need to start figuring out, now that we have the engine.
vague memory that some type of query service similar to this one was/is intended to be used to allow arbitrary access to Wikidata data from/on Wikimedia wikis such as the English Wikipedia.
Well, technically query engine is not direct access to Wikidata data - it's a copy of the data, not the actual data, and also for some accesses - such as single property/label value retrieval - it may be more efficient to use the direct access APIs that Wikidata is enabling right now. But for more complex requests I think that is the engine that would be supporting that.
Hey MZ :)
On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 7:00 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Dan Garry wrote:
The Discovery Department at the Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to announce the release of the Wikidata Query Service https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikidata_query_service! You can find the interface for the service at https://query.wikidata.org.
The Wikidata Query Service is designed to let users run queries on the data contained in Wikidata. The service uses SPARQL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARQL as the query language. You can see some example queries in the user manual https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikidata_query_service/User_Manual.
Thanks for this e-mail. Wikidata query service looks neat.
When will be this type of functionality be available on-wiki? I have a vague memory that some type of query service similar to this one was/is intended to be used to allow arbitrary access to Wikidata data from/on Wikimedia wikis such as the English Wikipedia.
You're mixing up two things. (No problem. It _is_ confusing.) Let me try to untangle it: * The Wikipedias only had access to the dataset from Wikidata that was directly linked via an interwiki link on any given article. This had technical reasons - performance among others. The Wikidata team has worked over the past months to remove this limitation. That is what we call arbitrary access - you can get data from any dataset on Wikidata. This is now live on many of our wikis. There are only a few missing - among them English Wikipedia. English Wikipedia will get it next Wednesday. * The other thing is automatic list creation and maintenance and related features. My team is still planning to do this. The Wikidata Query Service is the basis for it. Magnus has made a working prototype already that you can try out right now: http://magnusmanske.de/wordpress/?p=301 It'd be great for more people to use this and give us feedback so we can let that influence future features.
Cheers Lydia
Lydia Pintscher wrote:
- The Wikipedias only had access to the dataset from Wikidata that was
directly linked via an interwiki link on any given article. This had technical reasons - performance among others. The Wikidata team has worked over the past months to remove this limitation. That is what we call arbitrary access - you can get data from any dataset on Wikidata. This is now live on many of our wikis. There are only a few missing - among them English Wikipedia. English Wikipedia will get it next Wednesday.
- The other thing is automatic list creation and maintenance and
related features. My team is still planning to do this. The Wikidata Query Service is the basis for it. Magnus has made a working prototype already that you can try out right now: http://magnusmanske.de/wordpress/?p=301 It'd be great for more people to use this and give us feedback so we can let that influence future features.
Hi.
Thanks for the reply. I'm still not sure I fully understand the status/progress and how Wikidata infrastructure interrelates.
From a wiki such as the English Wikipedia, I want to be able to
dynamically create a list of every president of the United States, for example. In terms of implementation, the on-wiki interface would likely be Scribunto/Lua modules or a parser function or some kind, I think? Are you saying this type of arbitrary querying will be possible soon?
On Meta-Wiki, I happened to see https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?diff=13546684&oldid=13540264, which is also kind of muddying the timelines and features in my head. It sounds like, at least for Meta-Wiki, the Wikidata access roll-out won't be happening in September, it'll be happening in October. And even in October, it will be limited to interwiki data initially. Is what's being discussed on Meta-Wiki (interwiki data access) what the English Wikipedia and other Wikipedias have already had for several months?
I'm really excited about the ability to do arbitrary on-wiki querying. :-)
MZMcBride
On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 8:42 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Hi.
Thanks for the reply. I'm still not sure I fully understand the status/progress and how Wikidata infrastructure interrelates.
From a wiki such as the English Wikipedia, I want to be able to dynamically create a list of every president of the United States, for example. In terms of implementation, the on-wiki interface would likely be Scribunto/Lua modules or a parser function or some kind, I think? Are you saying this type of arbitrary querying will be possible soon?
It'll still take some time until my team can dive into it. We still have to take care of a few more fundamental data quality related features. Until then you can use Magnus' excellent bot to do something similar.
On Meta-Wiki, I happened to see https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?diff=13546684&oldid=13540264, which is also kind of muddying the timelines and features in my head. It sounds like, at least for Meta-Wiki, the Wikidata access roll-out won't be happening in September, it'll be happening in October. And even in October, it will be limited to interwiki data initially. Is what's being discussed on Meta-Wiki (interwiki data access) what the English Wikipedia and other Wikipedias have already had for several months?
Yes. They are getting what enwp and others have had for quite some time.
I'm really excited about the ability to do arbitrary on-wiki querying. :-)
:) Me too!
Cheers Lydia
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