CompareWare
Table of Contents
Problem: Searching for a new tool and comparing leads to scrambling through
- Awesome-lists on GitHub
- Personal features comparisons by (usually biased) people
- Comparison sites with little depth
Solution: Wiki where tools/software (maybe even hardware or anything else) can be entered and given attributes (like in OSM) which can then be compared.
Related Posts:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Wikidata/comments/tcqwpg/software_and_hardware_comparison_tool_using/
- https://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2020/01/29/newbie-guide-querying-wikidata/
- https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSMdata#Help_this_project
Description
CompareWare is an Open-Data-Project inspired by OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia as well as frustration with existing ways of finding the right tools in the vastly interconnected world we inhabit, where considerable effort is duplicated and inside knowledge only shared among peers rather than globally. It extends Wikidata entries with often subjective free-form key-value properties with de-facto standards as in OpenStreetMap, but for IT tools rather than locations.
The main distinguisher is its ability to compare any type of tool on any property, making separate comparisons often created as distinguisher by software-authors obsolete. It also enables users to create and share lists, reviews and opinions in a separate space.
Reddit Post
I am kind of frustrated by proprietary sites like AlternativeTo, incomprehensible Wikipedia grids and personal reviews and comparisons. I would like to build an effective open-source crowdsourced tool for objective (and maybe a little subjective), extensive and categoric comparison of Software - which could probably be extended to just about anything else, too.
I was considering to build it based on Wikidata, as it already has some basedata on most things, with an editing concept similar to OpenStreetMap - where custom tagging concepts can be implemented by anyone and then standardized de facto, next to already established tags. Could this be realized purely within Wikidata, basically only an alternatively purposed frontend for it that includes editing possibilities, or are the detailed entries unfitting for its database and may be potentially rejected, so I should have an own database for the tool to build atop Wikidata?
The idea is that many people regularly compare tools, and if these comparisons are published in a structured fashion, a lot of human time can be saved while people find alternatives they never would have considered.
Structure
ArangoDB with ODBL
- type
- software (circle), service (octagon), specification (diamond), hardware (square) -> ontology
- wikidata
- obtain license, author, url, name, version
- slug
- short, unique, stable human-readable identifier
- description
- short text about the program
- license
- free/proprietary…
- author
- company/creator/developer
- no generic “tags” field (?)
- features sublist
Collaborative Tag Schemes like in OSM
Categories
- to know what to compare by e.g. productivity, task manager, IDE
- problem: tools maybe don’t fit in neatly -> generate “similar to”
Relations
- part of
- integrates with (potentially replace by creating APIs as specs)
- implements (specs, with version info or “partially”)
- extends
- forks
Extensions
- stack
- share software stacks (frontend/middleware/backend/infra)
- rig
- share builds/part collections
- diff
- compare software/hardware