Handling Wikidata Qualifiers in Reasoning

Wikidata is a knowledge graph increasingly adopted by many communities for diverse applications. Wikidata statements are annotated with qualifier-value pairs that are used to depict information such as the validity context of the statement, its causality, provenances, etc. Handling the qualifiers in reasoning is a challenging problem. When defining inference rules (in particular, rules on ontological properties (x subclass of y, z instance of x, etc.), one must consider the qualifiers as most of them participate in the semantics of the statements. This poses a complex problem because a) there is a massive number of qualifiers, and b) the qualifiers of the inferred statement are often a combination of the qualifiers in the rule condition. In this work, we propose to address this problem by a) defining a categorization of the qualifiers b) formalizing the Wikidata model with a many-sorted logical language; the sorts of this language are the qualifier categories. We couple this logic with an algebraic specification that provides a means for effectively handling qualifiers in inference rules. The work supports the expression of all current Wikidata ontological properties. Finally, we discuss the methodology for practically implementing the work and present a prototype implementation.