SMWCon Fall 2013/BlueForge Feature Matrix: WikiData - An experience report

This talk covers the experience of Hallo Welt! developers and decision makers, gathered in a real world project: Creating a Software Feature Matrix for the BlueForge website. We want to explain the idea behind the project, share the evaluation process and report about pitfalls and problems.

What is BlueForge? What is a Software Feature Matrix?

 * Software directory
 * Stakeholder
 * User / enthusiast
 * Decision makers
 * Vendors
 * Consultants
 * Not: End user in need for a manual

Requirements / Evaluation / Selection

 * Specifics of software features
 * there are variants (e.g. "free" vs. "professional version") / forks
 * there are versions with new features or different implementations of the same feature
 * features are not binary, they differ in quality
 * Feature comparison
 * There are groups / cateories of software
 * Features can be added / evaluated within the wiki/wikidata via UI
 * State of knowledge (Wikidata) vs. actual knowledge (SMW)

Proposed data model
Within Wiki
 * An article represents a piece of software, all versions, all variants
 * A category represents a group of software. A piece of software can be in multiple categories

Structured data

 * A piece of software is an item
 * A feature is a property
 * features have qualifiers (since version, user rating, ...)
 * features have sources (vendor, user)
 * features have (custom) data types
 * Groups are an item
 * Features of a group are a property of property (aka schema)
 * Naming is consistent between wiki and wikidata -> link is by convention

Server setup

 * there are two systems: Wiki and (local instance of) Wikidata

Experience with Wikidata

 * Data model can be implemented in Wikidata. Philosopy seems to overlap
 * Architecture seems to be flexible enough
 * Officially not ready for 3rd party use: we are very early adopters :)
 * Schema via UI / tool support
 * Hard to set up, we used vagrant in the end (?)
 * PHP dependency: do not use > 5.3.6 (? have to look that up)
 * Value autocomplete seems to be resource intensive without additional data stores