wikibase-sdk

JS utils functions to query a Wikibase instance and simplify its results

This package was primarily developed as wikidata-sdk but has now being generalized to support any Wikibase instance: wikidata.org among others.

This project received a Wikimedia Project Grant.

Summary

Changelog
Dependencies
Install
- as a module
- download pre-bundled files
Features
Contributing
See Also
You may also like
License

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md for version info

Dependencies

This module uses JavaScript ES6, which means NodeJS >= v6.4.0 or not too outdated web browsers.

For older version, you can use ES5 bundles.

Install

as a module

Install via npm to be able to use the module with require (CommonJS) or import (ES6 Modules)

npm install wikibase-sdk

Then in your javascript:

const WBK = require('wikibase-sdk')
const wbk = WBK({
  instance: 'https://my-wikibase-instan.se',
  sparqlEndpoint: 'https://query.my-wikibase-instan.se/sparql' // Required to use `sparqlQuery` and `getReverseClaims` functions, optional otherwise
})

The wdk object of previous versions of this documentation - from the time this module was bound to wikidata.org only - thus corresponds to the following:

const WBK = require('wikibase-sdk')
const wdk = WBK({
  instance: 'https://www.wikidata.org',
  sparqlEndpoint: 'https://query.wikidata.org/sparql'
})

For convenience, and for the sake of retro-compatibility, that same wdk object can be obtain directly from the wikidata-sdk package:

// After having run `npm install wikidata-sdk`
const wdk = require('wikidata-sdk')

and instance-independant helper functions are directly available from the module root:

const { simplify, parse, isEntityId, isPropertyId, ... } = require('wikibase-sdk')

By default wikibase-sdk assumes that your Wikibase instance has $wgScriptPath set to /w, but if that's not the case, you can set it by passing a wgScriptPath parameter:

const wbk = require('wikibase-sdk')({
  instance: 'https://my-wikibase-instan.se',
  wgScriptPath: '/some_custom_script_path'
})

download pre-bundled files

If you just want to import the lib from an HTML file and don't have a setup that can import with CommonJS or ES6 Modules, you can simply download those pre-bundled files:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/maxlath/wikibase-sdk/dist/dist/wikibase-sdk.js
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/maxlath/wikibase-sdk/dist/dist/wikidata-sdk.js
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/maxlath/wikibase-sdk/dist/dist/wikibase-sdk.min.js
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/maxlath/wikibase-sdk/dist/dist/wikidata-sdk.min.js

then you can import it in your html:

<script src="/path/to/wikibase-sdk.js"></script>
<script>console.log('can access WBK', WBK)</script>
<script src="/path/to/wikidata-sdk.js"></script>
<script>console.log('can access wdk, the wikidata.org bound product of WBK', wdk)</script>

Features

Wikibase API

A set of functions to make read queries to a Wikibase instance API (see Wikidata API documentation). For write operations, see wikibase-edit.

Wikibase Query

There are additional functions for Wikibase instances that have a SPARQL Query Service (such as Wikidata Query for wikidata.org). SPARQL can be a weird thing at first, but the Wikidata team and community really puts lots of efforts to make things easy with a super rich Wikidata Query Help page, an awesome tool to test you queries and visualize the result, and lots of examples!

Get JSON from a SPARQL query
Simplify results
Pre-baked queries
- Get entities reverse claims

General helpers

Contributing

Context

This library had for primary purpose to serve the needs of the inventaire project but extending its capabilities to other needs it totally possible: feel welcome to post your suggestions as issues or pull requests!

Design constraints

wikibase-sdk should stay "small" and dependency-free, so that a web application can include it in its bundle without paying a too high cost for it. A consequence is that the lib generates URLs where other libs would integrate doing the request and parsing it's response. But that actually feels quite right to do this way: simply generating the URLs let's users free to handle requests as they like (with callbacks, promises, async/await, whatever!)
Therefore, it should focus on providing basic, general helper functions most application working with a Wikibase instance would need.
Write operations should go into wikibase-edit as it involves working with Wikibase credentials/tokens.
General command-line interface tools should go to wikibase-cli, very specific ones — wikidata-filter, import-wikidata-dump-to-couchdb, and alikes — should get their own modules.

License

MIT

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