If you're interested in the Wikidata project but you can't directly contribute in terms of code, you can help with some research: http://kendra.org.uk/ http://dev1.kendra.org.uk/
These people are doing something very similar, i.e. building free-form databases using a wiki-like model (see the second link).
We need to know: 1) What exactly are Kendra's capabilities? 2) Is there potential for cooperation between Kendra and Wikimedia?
If you want to research this, please respond to this message so that there's no needless duplication of effort. You could use http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Kendra_evaluation to chronicle your findings.
Regards,
Erik
On Sunday 26 September 2004 01:15, Erik Moeller wrote:
If you're interested in the Wikidata project but you can't directly contribute in terms of code, you can help with some research: http://kendra.org.uk/ http://dev1.kendra.org.uk/
These people are doing something very similar, i.e. building free-form databases using a wiki-like model (see the second link).
We need to know:
- What exactly are Kendra's capabilities?
- Is there potential for cooperation between Kendra and Wikimedia?
If you want to research this, please respond to this message so that there's no needless duplication of effort. You could use http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Kendra_evaluation to chronicle your findings.
I couldn't find anything on that page, so I'm posting here. I hereby release this e-mail under GFDL so anyone can use it to start a page on Meta or anywhere else.
Capabilities... uhh. It lets you freely edit pages. Pages may contain ordinary text, links, in the form of [[link]], what I'll call equivalences, in the form of [[key = value]], and what I'll call definitions, in the form of [[key; value]].
The equivalences let you set property of a page. Currently defined properties are:
is_a has_property has_range has_option
See http://dev1.kendra.org.uk/kendrabase/semantic_property for more info on this. Most example pages have an "is a" property while some have and some don't have more properties. AFAICT, you can think of properties as about table column definitions.
Their examples start with an ontology:
music_ontology: ---- [[is a = ontology]]
This is the bare bones of an ontology for [[music]]:
* [[album]] * [[song performance]] * [[artist]] * [[track]] ----
What's an ontology for I can't tell. You can make something similar to a table definition:
album: ---- [[is a = musical work]]
* [[has property = album title]] -- ''not sure what this means'' * [[has property = artist]] * [[has property = year]] * [[has property = publisher]] * [[has property = song performance]] ----
Each of these properties is defined on own page. I like this idea, though I see a lot of potential for naming conflicts here. Few examples:
artist: ---- [[is a = human being]] ----
year: ---- [[has range = integers]]
*[[has option = 2000]] *[[has option = 2001]] *[[has option = 2002]] *[[has option = 2003]] *[[has option = 2004]] *[[has option = 2005]] *[[has option = 2006]] ----
Kendra will let you easily define a query, for example see http://dev1.kendra.org.uk/cgi-bin/bootstrap.sh?action=query&title=album. I don't see a way to easily link to a query or include it into an article.
Finally, an example of actual data:
yes again: ---- [[is a; album]]
*[[album_title; yes_again]] *[[artist; yes]] *[[publisher; huge_records_co]] *[[year; 2000]] ----
From what I can tell, it seems that it doesn't have wiki features (page history, watchlist, current events), but this of course shouldn't be too hard to implement and I suppose that it's in plan.
They are using UseMod for their wiki, and Kendra is made in Python. So I don't think that there is much possibility for direct cooperation - surely, ideas could be exchanged, but Kendra can't just be poured into MediaWiki. OTOH, the Kendra site is done in PHP, so probably some of their developers know PHP.
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