Grauw’s blog

There is a nice project called Freebase, which is kind of a Wikipedia for structured data. I had already been adding or modifying some minor topics to Freebase, but while I was comparing revision control systems on Wikipedia I found that I was missing the ability to present it to myself in a more readable way.

What I wanted was to filter the tables on certain properties (e.g. distributed systems, license), because it was those that I was particularly interested in looking for. The tables as shown on Wikipedia are pretty huge because of the number of products they show, and don’t make it easy to e.g. compare Mercurial with Bazaar. Another thing was that on Wikipedia the tables were split up to fit them on the screen, that didn’t really help to get a good overview either.

So I decided to copy that data to Freebase in order to be able to make a little more sense of it (and just as a fun project to get a little more acquainted with Freebase :)). Because on Freebase data is structured, you can more easily filter and search on it, and present it in a way that is convenient for you. Also you can easily export the data to Excel, etc.

The result is the Revision control systems base.

What the base will basically show you is part of the data from these sets of tables on Wikipedia for a number of popular revision control systems. I did not add all the data because unfortunately it’s a manual process, so I limited myself to the systems that are as far as I know reasonably well-known and popular.

Well, maybe someone finds this interesting :). Feel free to add stuff that is missing, of course.

» Revision control systems base