After I recently wrote a small on-Wiki tool that can suggest statements to add to a Wikidata item, I thought that something like this might be useful in other tools as well. So, using the same concept and technology (Rust/axum) from my Authority Control API, I wrote WD-Infernal, an API that takes data, such as location coordinates or people’s names, and tries to infer Wikidata statements from that.
The idea of statement inference is obviously not novel, but AFAIK it is only implemented in individual codebases such as bots. Implemented as an API, any tool, bot etc. can use the inferred statements. I hope that feedback will improve the existing functions, and add new ones to this API.
In the greater scheme of things, my hope is to create more APIs to offer functionality around Wikidata, and to inspire others to do the same. An ecosystem of APIs would both simplify and standardize recurring tasks of (semi-)automatic Wikidata editing.