What started out in 2016 on Twitter became a (small) award winning decade long collaborative project. Unfortunately, the future is not clear. We are at odds if it will survice the growth of Wikidata and in particularly the SPARQL graph split. To be clear, the choice for Blazegraph initially worked great, but after it was bought by a big company, developed halted. Very unfortunate for Wikidata. Unlike earlier, we no longer have funding, and rewriting Scholia at this scale takes a good bit of effort. We already held a few hackathons.

So far, we have been able to continue to use a legacy SPARQL endpoint with all the data, but in exactly one month that endpoint will be sunset. And we are not ready.

Rescuing Scholia

Daniel and Lane have been leading an effort to rescue Scholia. The hackathons were part of this effort. It seems that QLever is the only route left. Earlier efforts to rewrite the more than 350 Scholia SPARQL queries to support the graph split have basically failed. The complexity is far too high. QLever, however, provides the full graph and since recently full SPARQL 1.1 support. That is also not enough to reproduce the full Scholia functionality, but it seems to get us far. Importantly, the data may not update as frequently as the WDQS, and that is another complexity to take into account. Particularly, all the 404 pages.

So, in the next weeks, we have to complete rewriting all those queries as queries that QLever can handle. A team of people have done great work already, including Konrad.

I hope we make it in time.