Hi! I was thinking recently about various data processing scenarios in wikidata and there's one case we don't have a good coverage for I think.
TLDR: One of the things I think we might do to make it easier to work with data is having ntriples (line-based) RDF dump format available. If you need to process a lot of data (like all enwiki sitelinks, etc.) then the Query Service is not very efficient there, due to limits and sheer volume of data. We could increase limits but not by much - I don't think we can allow a 30-minute processing task to hog the resources of the service to itself. We have some ways to mitigate this, in theory, but in practice they'll take time to be implemented and deployed. The other approach would be to do dump processing. Which would work in most scenarios but the problem is that we have two forms of dump right now - JSON and TTL (Turtle) and both are not easy to process without tools with deep understanding of the formats. For JSON, we have Wikidata Toolkit but it can't ingest RDF/Turtle, and also has some entry barrier to get everything running even when operation that needs to be done is trivial. So I was thinking - what if we had also ntriples RDF dump? The difference between ntriples and Turtle is that ntriples is line-based and fully expanded - which means every line can be understood on its own without needing any context. This enables to process the dump using the most basic text processing tools or any software that can read a line of text and apply regexp to it. The downside of ntriples is it's really verbose, but compression will take care of most of it, and storing another 10-15G or so should not be a huge deal. Also, current code already knows how to generate ntriples dump (in fact, almost all unit tests internally use this format) - we just need to create a job that actually generates it. Of course, with right tools you can generate ntriples dump from both Turtle one and JSON one (Wikidata toolkit can do the latter, IIRC) but it's one more moving part which makes it harder and introduces potential for inconsistencies and surprises. So, what do you think - would having ntriples RDF dump for wikidata help things? -- Stas Malyshev smalys...@wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikidata mailing list Wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata
