Re: Data extension protocol and linking to other reconciliation services

Figuring out how the ecosystem works as a whole with a variety of federated
endpoints is definitely worth some though.

On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 9:05 AM Antonin Delpeuch <antonin@delpeuch.eu>
wrote:

>
> At the moment, the Wikidata reconciliation service is not aware of that:
> when it returns GND ids, it returns them as bare strings. The user must
> know that there is a GND service to extend their data further.
>

Why wouldn't it return (at least optionally) URIs using formatter URI for
RDF resource <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1921> property for
the GND property <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P227> instead of
just bare strings? That would allow the client to dereference them for more
information or search for services which had additional information.

I am thinking that it would be nice if the Wikidata service could
> announce the GND service in the column metadata it returns, such that
> the resulting column is automatically considered as reconciled to that
> service when it is fetched in OpenRefine.
>

Although Wikidata currently has a list of third-party formatter URL
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P3303>, which are semantically
similar to a reconciliation service, it fundamentally seems like the wrong
place to serve as a reconciliation service registry.

Currently, reconciliation services can already return reconciled values
> in the data extension protocol, but it is assumed that these are
> reconciled values for the same service. They can announce which type of
> entities this corresponds to, but that is assumed to be a type in the
> same reconciliation service.
>

That seems like a bad assumption to bake in. Types should be global (ie
URIs), not associated with a single reconciliation service.

We could potentially extend that metadata to include a reconciliation
> service URI, such that the resulting column would be reconciled to this
> other service. It would provide a sort of federation mechanism between
> reconciliation endpoints.
>

It seems like the federation should be based on services advertising things
that they know about themselves, not asserting things about others that
they don't control. If I've got full URIs instead of raw strings, then I
should be able to figure out where to go for more information.

Tom