{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1", "title": "chem-bla-ics", "description": "Chemblaics (pronounced chem-bla-ics) is the science that uses open science and computers to solve problems in chemistry, biochemistry and related fields.", "home_page_url": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/", "feed_url": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/2025/12/08/rescuing-scholia.json", "icon": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/assets/images/chem-bla-ics_logo.png", "language": "en", "authors": [ { "name": "Egon Willighagen", "url": "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7542-0286", "_orcid": "0000-0001-7542-0286" } ], "items": [ { "id": "https://doi.org/10.59350/yh369-rr787", "url": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/2025/12/08/rescuing-scholia.html", "title": "Rescuing Scholia: will we make it in time?", "content_html": "

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

\n\n

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

\n\n

Rescuing Scholia

\n

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

\n\n

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

\n\n

I hope we make it in time.

", "summary": "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.", "date_published": "2025-12-08T00:00:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2025-12-08T00:00:00+00:00", "tags": ["scholia","wikidata","rdf","sparql"], "authors": [ { "name": "Egon Willighagen", "url": "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7542-0286" } ] } ] }