Re: [Wikidata-l] Data model (RDF)

2012-04-01 Thread Herman Bruyninckx

On Sun, 1 Apr 2012, Markus Krötzsch wrote:


A very interesting discussion. Some general answers to this are:

* Wikidata does, of course, not intend to implement complex reasoning (or any 
other algorithm that qualifies as complex).


* If useful for serving its requirements, Wikidata will not exclude modelling 
features just because they are also supported in OWL ;-) For example, it 
could be useful to say that Wikidata item describes the same as an external 
resource, which can be done in OWL using sameAs. Many communities could use 
this for integrating Wikidata information with other Web databases.


* The reasoning support in Wikidata will not in general limit the modelling 
support in Wikidata: it might be possible to say something that has a formal 
meaning in OWL, even if this formal meaning is not relevant for query 
answering in Wikidata (sameAs with external resources is a possible example, 
since Wikidata would surely not pull data from these sources for internal 
query answering).


* Wikidata will support various export formats, which have more or less 
native support for certain modelling features. We will use whatever 
expressivity is available in the given format to describe the Wikidata 
information as accurately as possible. This might again lead to some OWL 
constructs being used in RDF/OWL exports. All Wikidata content will have a 
formal meaning, and we will draw from existing experience and standards for 
defining this so that it is as widely compatible as possible.


In summary, it is not about endorsing or rejecting a particular ontology 
language. We will be open and inclusive with what we support, and user 
requirements will be the main guideline for defining what can be said in 
the system.


This sounds good to me. (Not in the least because this would allow data
representations that are optimized for certain classes of knowledge, e.g.,
Topic Maps, or mathematical/physical relationships.)

But it triggers the obvious question: when and how will such discussions
(and decision making) be done in the course of the coming year?


Best regards,

Markus


Best regards,

Herman Bruyninckx


On 01/04/12 08:54, Ivan Herman wrote:


On Mar 31, 2012, at 11:17 , Jakob Voss wrote:


JFC Morfin wrote:



2. Since we have a W3C expert: what is the best document/book to get
a comprehensive and clear (not too massive) documentation on the
semantic web?


You surely don't want to know all about semantic web - especially the
Ontology stuff with OWL dialects and entailment regimes is far too
academic and won't be part of wikidata because of computational
complexity anyway. In short, you should be *very sceptical* and
cautious every time you stumple upon anything that requires inference
rules. Even trivial inference rules such as those based on owl:sameAs
and rdf:type can be problematic in practice! The less inference you
assume, the better.



Let us avoid the all-to-simplistic view that says Semantic Web == OWL:-)

Indeed, bringing in (OWL) inferencing into the core WD project would be a 
mistake. From the SW stack, RDF, RDFS, and, on a different note, SPARQL and 
maybe RDB2RDF should be the technologies having a role in the project, as 
well and Linked Data patterns in general.


That being said, it is probably good to have the vocabularies being used in 
WD be properly defined/described. If *somebody else* wants to do 
inferencing, for example, we should not stand in the way.


Ivan



I can recommend the Linked Data Patterns book by Dodds and Davis:
http://patterns.dataincubator.org/book/


Indeed. That is a great one, too

Ivan


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Re: [Wikidata-l] Data model (RDF)

2012-03-28 Thread Ivan Herman
Obviously, you all expect me to agree with Martynas, in view of my job, and I 
do:-). But I do not only because I work for W3C, but I indeed genuinely believe 
that reinventing things here may be way too costly on long term...

Note also that W3C may start a new group later this year that would look at a 
'lower' level HTTP protocol to manage (read and write) RDF data without 
necessarily using SPARQL. This may be useful for the project as well.

Ivan

On Mar 28, 2012, at 18:02 , Martynas Jusevicius wrote:

 Hey all,
 
 I've been reading some of the technical notes on Wikidata, for example
 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Notes/Data_model
 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Nikola_Smolenski/Wikidata#Query_language
 
 Statements like [data model] similar to RDF, but allows qualified
 property values and should there be a query language that will
 enable querying of the data? concern me a great deal regarding the
 future of the whole Wikidata project.
 
 It seems to me that whoever is making these technical decisions does
 not fully realize the price of reinventing the bike -- or in this
 situation, reinventing data models/formats/standards. Having designed
 and implemented production-grade applications both on RDBMSs, XML, and
 RDF, I strogly suggest you should base Wikidata on standard RDF.
 
 I know some/most of you are coming from the wiki background which
 might be hard to get over with, but if Wikidata is to become a free
 and open knowledge base on the (Semantic) Web, then RDF is the free
 and open industry standard for that. Whatever little advantage you
 would get from developing a custom non-standard data model, think how
 many man-years of standardization and tool development you would
 loose. Isn't knowledge about standing on the shoulders of giants? RDF
 has all the specifications, a variety of tools, and DBPedia as a very
 solid proof-of-concept (which I also think should be better integrated
 with this project) necessary to build Wikidata.
 With SPARQL Update, full read/write RDF roundtrip is possible (and
 works in practice). It also makes the notion of API rather obsolete,
 since SPARQL Update (and related mechanisms) is the only generic
 API-method one has to deal with.
 
 To round up -- I think failure to realize the potential of RDF for
 Wikidata would be a huge waste of resources for this project,
 Wikipedia, and the general public.
 
 Martynas
 graphity.org
 
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