On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 5:03 PM, Markus Krötzsch <markus@semantic-mediawiki.org> wrote:

I applaud your comparison of inferencing with a form of decompression. I think this is a nice intuition (in fact, some people have researched "semantic compression" where one tries to reduce the size of a knowledge base by eliminating things that follow from the rest anyway).

Markus, sorry the delay answering to this, I had to let the ideas grow for a while.

I also like the idea of decompression, that is what makes your "database of inferred data" even more useful. There is a lot of data that can be inferred, and not just from following the relationships, but by computing. For instance "population density" which can be calculated from "area" and "population", or aggregates of the population of each town in a district.

Another source of inferred statements are wp categories. Most of them are very easily translatable into statements, and the other way round too. A place where to store and process these inferences would be most useful if WD is not the right place.

You also say: "Constraints are a great start. We should now ask how we could improve the management of constraints in the future, and which constraints we will have then."

The first step will be having them as statements, then having them as queries, and finally automating their correction, either by semi-automatic tools, or with gamification. How to automatically transform a constraint into a game to solve the outliers it might be also an interesting topic. And of course, more far fetched, but nevertheless relevant is how to connect the property to a perceptual mechanism.

About improving the reliability: yes, as wikidata grows bigger some statements become more important. There is something to be learnt about how neural nets work, specially strengthening most-used (or traveled, or accepted, or viewed) connections. Another process little understood now is the need to forget, or in wikidata terms auto-deprecate information that is no longer current. Not very relevant now, but something to keep in mind for the next years.

Cheers,

Micru