A human is not a part of a species, it is an instance of a species :)

Contradiction management is a very interisting topic, and contradictions
are inherent to Wikidata model. We can't expect everything is consistent
considering Wikidata only reflects sources, and that 2 sources can disagree
in an essentially inconsistent way.

We could expect however that several statements extracted from the same
source should be consistent themselves, but it might be rare that we will
have enough statements that will be sourced to draw useful inferences. This
can lead to subproblems like computing the maximum set of consistent
sources on a part of the graph or finding the sources that leads to
contradiction when took together.

However, we already have qualifiers that marks a source in contradiction
with another : "statement disputed by". We could assume that the sources
involved are probably inconsistent with each other.

Or we could simply drop the consistency checks out of the inference way :)
And leave it to the constraint system : if an inference draws a path that
leads to constraint violation, then community will be notified. To avoid
explosion, the scope of inerences could be limited (not trying to compute
the transitive closure of the inferences rules application). We could use
some sort of "partial consistency" notion, such as those used in constraint
programming.

Thinking about it I can imagine constraint problems such as "considering an
inference I deduced some way, is it fully consistent with the set of
sources we have, or is there a set of sources that implies the inference is
not true ?" -> Is the inference a tautology or is the infererence only
satisfiable in a problem where each statements maps to a variable, the
different sources are values for the domain of the variables, and the
sources must be consistent wrt. what we know they says on Wikidata ?

2015-08-27 14:43 GMT+02:00 Svavar Kjarrval <[email protected]>:

> So far from the other thread, the current need seems to be for two types
> of definitions:
> 1. How to interpret declarations depending on associated properties.
> 2. Constraints (or suggestions) when interpreting multiple items.
>
> The first definition is used so the machine can know *if* the
> declaration is up in the hierarchy or sideways. When interpreting the
> item, the machine needs to know if the property implies that all
> declarations of that item are inhereted. If we take some currently
> living human as an example who has a Wikidata item and that human is
> connected to an occupation via a property. The machine should know if it
> should process the declarations of the occupation to apply them to the
> human, in whole or partially. Then there are properties which don't
> inheret, like if the human has a declared family member, the human
> doesn't inherit the other family member's name or birthdate.
>
> The other definition has the purpose of solving contradictions like in
> my example of Stubbs. If we are realistic, it's not likely that a tree
> structure with that much data is totally free of contradictions. So we
> need to have some way of telling the machine that there are, or could
> be, contradictions. One example of this to define that a certain
> property can't be more than one of something (at any given time). For
> simplification (not referring to the current data structure) is that a
> human is a part of a certain species. If we were to define, in this
> case, that any item can't be part of more than one species, then the
> machine would detect a contradiction. In the specific example of Stubbs,
> the machine would determine that cats and humans are two separate
> species and there can be only one[1]. If we had a definition that the
> declaration closer to the item in the specific link has precedence, then
> the machine would solve it by determining that mayors are generally
> humans but Stubbs being a cat is an exception to that rule.
>
> [1] Didn't see the Highlander reference until I had written it.
>
> - Svavar Kjarrval
>
>
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