Am 30.09.2015 um 23:38 schrieb Peter F. Patel-Schneider:
I would argue that inference-making bots should be considered only as a stop-gap measure, and that a different mechanism should be considered for making inferences in Wikidata. I am not arguing for Inference done Just Right (tm). It is not necessary to get inference perfect the first time around. All that is required is an inference mechanism that is examinable and maybe overridable.
To do that, you would have to bake the inference rules into software in the backend software, out of community control, maintained by a small group of people. It's contrary to the idea of letting the community define and maintain the ontology and semantics.
We are actually experimenting with something in that direction -- checking constraints defined on-wiki using rules written into software on the backend, hard-coding rules that were defined by the community. It's conceivable that we might end up doing something like that for inference, too, but it's a lot harder, and the slippery slope away from the community model seems much steeper to me.
When I started to think about, and work on, wikidata/wikibase, I believed doing inference on the server would be a very useful. The longer I work on the project, the more convinced I become that we have to be very careful with this. Wikidata is a "social machine", cutting the community out of the loop is detrimental in the long run, even if it would make some processes more efficient.