{ "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/2025/12/31/rescuing-scholia-2-getting-close.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/10.59350/6t2qh-2f839", "url": "https://chem-bla-ics.linkedchemistry.info/2025/12/31/rescuing-scholia-2-getting-close.html", "title": "Rescuing Scholia #2: getting closer", "content_html": "

Three weeks ago, I wrote a the post Rescuing Scholia: will we make it in time?,\nwhere I sketched a future without Scholia. Scholia, started\nalmost 10 years ago\nand I think it is worth keeping around longer.

\n\n

Fortunately, it looks like we will have a working replacement in time before the\nWDQS instance with all the\nWikidata triples in a single SPARQL endpoint goes down,\nlikely in a week or so (even tho we may be behind the citation peak).

\n\n

The work of the past year helped, for exampe, making it easier to configure Scholia for a different\nendpoint and the asynchronous loading of panels (reducing the stress on the SPARQL end point).\nAlready in September, Prof. Hannah Bast started\na branch for the transition and various\nhackathons this autumn, and the work by Konrad Linded\nwho explored and addressed some of the hurdles to take. The tips and suggestions from\nHannah and RobinTF really made a difference. And also a huge thanks\nto Daniel who kept relentlessly pushing this forward.

\n\n

When I posted my will we make it post,\nthere was a demo instance and a spreadsheet showing the state of each query. The instance\nshowed no human-readable labels. This was because the WDQS wikibase:label service \nwas used a lot, and there is no replacement for that. Getting labels for all relevant\nitems is possible, but makes the queries a lot heavier and made even more queries\nrun out of memory. Various solutions were discussed,\nFinn indicated he preferred a macro solution,\nwhich Lars implemented, and\nsaw some tweaks after that. Then followed a long series of patches by particularly\nPeter to update all the SPARQL queries to have them use\nthe new labels macro. But plenty of other things were fixed or newly implemented,\nsuch as Wolfgang’s /backend\npage.

\n\n

So, with one week to go, we need your help: as the weekly\nWikidata Status Update\nalready indicated:

\n\n
\n

this month’s Scholia hackathon has moved Scholia closer to its planned switch to a\nQLever backend. Beta testers can assist by exploring the\ninterim QLever-backed Scholia instance\nand reporting any issues.

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\n\n

And thanks to Adriano and others who already have!

\n\n

Now, we are not done yet. The real instance at scholia.toolforge.org\nhas seen ridiculous abuse by scrapers (and the main instance is regularly unusable, to be honest),\nand we have no idea the new setup is powerful enough. And we need to point to the new servers anyway.\nSo, plenty of work is left to be done in the next few days.

\n\n

But we are getting close. So, please give qlever.scholia.wiki\na go, and let us know your observations. As Linus’s law writes:

\n\n
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Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

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", "summary": "Three weeks ago, I wrote a the post Rescuing Scholia: will we make it in time?, where I sketched a future without Scholia. Scholia, started almost 10 years ago and I think it is worth keeping around longer.", "date_published": "2025-12-31T00:00:00+00:00", "date_modified": "2025-12-31T00:00:00+00:00", "tags": ["wikidata","scholia","sparql","rdf"], "authors": [ { "name": "Egon Willighagen", "url": "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7542-0286" } ] } ] }