title: Vetting Second Hand Knowledge in an Ontology
body: <p>How would you assign objective certainties to statements asserted by different users in an ontology?</p>
  
  <p>For example, consider User A asserts "Bob's hat is blue" while User B asserts "Bob's hat is red". How would you determine if:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>User A and User B are referring to different people named Bob, and may or may not be correct.</li>
  <li>Both users are referring to the same person, but User A is right and User B is mistaken (or vice versa).</li>
  <li>Both users are referring to the same person, but User A is right and User B is lying (or vice versa).</li>
  <li>Both users are referring to the same person, and both uses are either mistaken or lying.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>The main difficulty I see is the ontology doesn't have any way to obtain first-hand data (e.g. it can't ask Bob what color his hat is).</p>
  
  <p>I realize there's probably no entirely objective way to resolve this. Are there any heuristics that could be employed? Does this problem have a formal name?</p>