wikiprov

Rudimentary reification in Wikidata. This package takes the spargo generic SPARQL handling package I created and wraps Wikibase provenance around it.

wikiprov status

wikiprov: spargo status

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Introduction

Where the generic SPARQL results from any service look as follows:

{
  "head": {},
  "results": {
    "bindings": [{}]
  }
}

With Wikidata sitting on-top of a Wikibase instance, it allows us to try and retrieve some amount of provenance for the IRIs returned. While not 'pure' linked data as we might like we can make the best of what we've got and return it with our query results anyway. Those results take the form:

{
  "head": {},
  "results": {
    "bindings": [{}]
  },
  "provenance": {}
}

The Provenance block comes from the wikiprov package and (per unique QID) tentatively looks as follows:

{
  "Title": "Q5381415",
  "Revision": 1343296571,
  "Modified": "2021-01-18T05:36:32Z",
  "Permalink": "https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?format=json\u0026oldid=1343296571\u0026title=Q5381415",
  "History": [
    "2021-01-18T05:36:32Z (oldid: 1343296571): 'Lockal' edited: '/* wbcreateclaim-create:1| */ [[Property:P646]]: /m/0fc557'",
    "2020-08-04T23:41:27Z (oldid: 1247209137): 'Beet keeper' edited: '/* wbsetclaim-update:2||1 */ [[Property:P4152]]: B297E169'",
    "2020-08-04T23:40:10Z (oldid: 1247208427): 'Beet keeper' edited: '/* wbsetclaim-update:2||1 */ [[Property:P4152]]: 325E1010'",
    "2020-02-21T14:40:33Z (oldid: 1120067133): 'YULdigitalpreservation' edited: '/* wbsetaliases-add:3|en */ Envoy Document File, Envoy Document, Envoy 1'",
    "2020-02-21T14:38:57Z (oldid: 1120066909): 'YULdigitalpreservation' edited: '/* wbsetclaim-create:2||1 */ [[Property:P348]]: 1'"
  ]
}

This enables users to look up a QID and see what last happened to that record from the same SPARQL results source.

Architectural decisions

Errors returned from SPARQLWithProv

When the call is made to the underlying Wikibase API the results are all collected and returned to the caller. If there are any errors spotted thereafter then the results are rejected and a blank WikiProv{} structure is replaced. Callers will need to run the process again or fallback on SPARQLGo from the spargo library.

The handling of this situation can be much more graceful in future implementations. Rejecting all results to begin seemed the least ambiguous while the library is developed further.

License

Apache License 2.0. More info here.