

Re: Abbreviated assertions (was: Certainty Factors)

From: Dan Brickley <Daniel.Brickley@bristol.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 1999 20:04:33 +0000 (GMT)
Message-ID: <Pine.GHP.4.21.9912131953330.3547-100000@mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk>
On Mon, 13 Dec 1999, Daniel LaLiberte wrote:
> But this [[ reified-esque]]  form is actually better than using the reified form directly
> because someone else might want to attach a different probability to the
> same reified form.  The term "probability" may mean exactly the same
> thing in both cases so it may not make sense to use different terms, but
> each probability value may have been computed by a different method or
> using the same method but at different times.  So it seems better to
> associate the probability with an independent node.

Another reason for not attaching probabilistic information to bare
rdf:Statement nodes is that you may want a different granularity, ie. to
talk about an information item that is bigger than a single simple
triple. RDF model doesn't itself provide constructs for doing so,
although an rdf:Bag of rdf:Statements would appear to be a likely

Attaching evidence to probabilistic assertions and to Web annotations is
also of great interest to me. This could be done either entirely within RDF,
or some combination of RDF and human-oriented docs.

For example, person A might assert that 

	[org:scientistics] --type--> [util:OppressedMinorityReligion]

while person B asserts that 
	[org:scientistics] --type--> [util:Cult]

Both A and B will want to point to informational items on the Web that
support their respective claims. Perhaps a 3rd party investigating the
issue might want to publish probabilistic information in a summary of
their findings, eg. that [assertion1] is more likely than [assertion2]
(or vice-versa). Or that [legal-findings-report-34343] supports one or
the other of these claims, absolutely or with some proability value.

I believe we need a way for bags of rdf:Statements (or similar) to be
referenced as supporting such assertions, but also for published HTML
(... PDF, Postscript etc) documents to be invoked in these contexts.
And for common patterns to evolve for doing so. I want there to be a
common URI for the claim that the earth is flat so I can ask databases
for references to all published papers that have been claimed as
supportive of that assertion.

Received on Monday, 13 December 1999 15:06:31 GMT
