Last modified: 2014-10-13 13:28:04 UTC
Wikidata contains a variety of properties that refer to external resources using standard identifiers for such resources, e.g. ISBN, VIAF, MusicBrainz, GND, etc. it should be possible for clients to resolve these to URIs automatically, either by including the URI expansion in the JSON representation of the respective Statement or DataValue, or by at least including the necessary mappings elsewhere in the JSON document. Currently, Wikibase knows nothing about the interpretation of external IDs, which are stored and interpreted as plain StringValues. In order to provide URI expansion, a new DataType would be needed on top of StringValue, which would contain the URI pattern and perhaps regular expressions for validating and/or normalizing the IDs. This additional information would need to be recorded in the respective property definitions (or in a separate vocabulary definition which could be re-used by multiple properties).
