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For reference, this is from the same developer [1] that created Semantic MediaWiki [2] and lead the development of Wikidata [3]. Here's a link to the white pap

For reference, this is from the same developer [1] that created Semantic MediaWiki [2] and lead the development of Wikidata [3]. Here's a link to the white paper [4] describing Abstract Wikipedia (and Wikilambda). Considering the success of Wikidata, I'm hopeful this effort succeeds, but it is pretty ambitious. [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Denny https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Denny [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidata [4] https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04733 https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04733

xiler 6y ago
He also works on Google's Knowledge Graph https://research.google/people/vrandecic/ https://research.google/people/vrandecic/ https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/691b38437acf640f8f1cbb939c6bbc76267b739c.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
- O_H_E 6y ago
  Damn. Big kudos to Denny. And to all the other people doing awesome work but not on the top of HN.
- gcbw3 6y ago
  Considering the close relationship with Google and Wikimedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_and_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_and_Wikipedia and the considerable money Google gives them, how can one not see this project as "crowdsourcing better training data-sets for Google?" Can the data be licensed as GPL-3 or similar?
  - bawolff 6y ago
    I dont think the relationship is that close - all it says is google donated a chunk of money in 2010 and in 2019, it was a large chunk of money(~3% of donations) but not like so much to make a dependency. > Can the data be licensed as GPL-3 or similar? Pretty unlikely tbh. I dont know if anything is decided for licensing, but if it is to be a "copyleft" license it would be cc-by-sa (like wikipedia) since this is not a program. Keep in mind that in the united states, an abstract list of facts cannot be copyrighted afaik (i dont think this qualifies as that, wikidata might though)
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    How so? Wikimedia-provided data can be used by anyone. Google could have kept using and building on their Freebase dataset had they wanted to - other actors in the industry don't have it nearly as easy.
  - nl 6y ago
    That's an incredibility zero-sum way of looking at the world. Almost every research group and company doing NLP work uses Wikipedia I'd say it is a fantastic donation by Google which improves science generally. > Can the data be licensed as GPL-3 or similar? It's under CC BY-SA and (with a few exceptions) the GNU Free Documentation License.
  - antonii 6y ago
    Denny seems to be leaving Google and joining Wikimedia Foundation to lead the project this month, so probably you do not need to worry too much about Denny's affiliation with Google.
9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
As a long-time Wikipedian, this track record is actually worrisome. Semantic Mediawiki (which I attempted to use at one point) is difficult to work with and far too complicated and abstract for the average Wiki editor. (See also Tim Berners-Lee and the failure of Semantic Web.) WikiData is a seemingly genius concept -- turn all those boxes of data into a queryable database! -- kneecapped by academic but impractical technology choices (RDF/SPARQL). If they had just dumped the data into a relational database queryable by SQL, it would be far more accessible to developers and data scientists.
- LukeEF 6y ago
  RDF shouldn't be lumped in with SPARQL
  - tasogare 6y ago
    That’s the same set of technology. SPARQL is used to query RDF graphs, that’s pretty tightly coupled.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  How do you dump general purpose, encyclopedic data into a relational database? What database schema would you use? The whole point of "triples" as a data format is that they're extremely general and extensible.
  - 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
    Most structured data in Wikipedia articles is in either infoboxes or tables, which can easily be represented as tabular data. Table country: Name,Capital,Population Aland,Foo,100 Bland,Bar,200 Now you need a graph for representing connections between pages, but as long as the format is consistent (as they are in templates/infoboxes) that can be done with foreign keys. Table capital ID,Name 123,Foo 456,Bar Table country Name,Capital_id,Population Aland,123,100 Bland,456,200
    - 6y ago

xiler 6y ago

He also works on Google's Knowledge Graph https://research.google/people/vrandecic/ https://research.google/people/vrandecic/ https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/691b38437acf640f8f1cbb939c6bbc76267b739c.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...

O_H_E 6y ago
Damn. Big kudos to Denny. And to all the other people doing awesome work but not on the top of HN.
gcbw3 6y ago
Considering the close relationship with Google and Wikimedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_and_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_and_Wikipedia and the considerable money Google gives them, how can one not see this project as "crowdsourcing better training data-sets for Google?" Can the data be licensed as GPL-3 or similar?
- bawolff 6y ago
  I dont think the relationship is that close - all it says is google donated a chunk of money in 2010 and in 2019, it was a large chunk of money(~3% of donations) but not like so much to make a dependency. > Can the data be licensed as GPL-3 or similar? Pretty unlikely tbh. I dont know if anything is decided for licensing, but if it is to be a "copyleft" license it would be cc-by-sa (like wikipedia) since this is not a program. Keep in mind that in the united states, an abstract list of facts cannot be copyrighted afaik (i dont think this qualifies as that, wikidata might though)
- zozbot234 6y ago
  How so? Wikimedia-provided data can be used by anyone. Google could have kept using and building on their Freebase dataset had they wanted to - other actors in the industry don't have it nearly as easy.
- nl 6y ago
  That's an incredibility zero-sum way of looking at the world. Almost every research group and company doing NLP work uses Wikipedia I'd say it is a fantastic donation by Google which improves science generally. > Can the data be licensed as GPL-3 or similar? It's under CC BY-SA and (with a few exceptions) the GNU Free Documentation License.
- antonii 6y ago
  Denny seems to be leaving Google and joining Wikimedia Foundation to lead the project this month, so probably you do not need to worry too much about Denny's affiliation with Google.

9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago

As a long-time Wikipedian, this track record is actually worrisome. Semantic Mediawiki (which I attempted to use at one point) is difficult to work with and far too complicated and abstract for the average Wiki editor. (See also Tim Berners-Lee and the failure of Semantic Web.) WikiData is a seemingly genius concept -- turn all those boxes of data into a queryable database! -- kneecapped by academic but impractical technology choices (RDF/SPARQL). If they had just dumped the data into a relational database queryable by SQL, it would be far more accessible to developers and data scientists.

LukeEF 6y ago
RDF shouldn't be lumped in with SPARQL
- tasogare 6y ago
  That’s the same set of technology. SPARQL is used to query RDF graphs, that’s pretty tightly coupled.
zozbot234 6y ago
How do you dump general purpose, encyclopedic data into a relational database? What database schema would you use? The whole point of "triples" as a data format is that they're extremely general and extensible.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
  Most structured data in Wikipedia articles is in either infoboxes or tables, which can easily be represented as tabular data. Table country: Name,Capital,Population Aland,Foo,100 Bland,Bar,200 Now you need a graph for representing connections between pages, but as long as the format is consistent (as they are in templates/infoboxes) that can be done with foreign keys. Table capital ID,Name 123,Foo 456,Bar Table country Name,Capital_id,Population Aland,123,100 Bland,456,200
  - 6y ago