On 20.12.2012 20:52, Gregor Hagedorn wrote:
I believe there are a lot of dangerous assumptions on http://simia.net/valueparser/
First: there is no indication in a number that it is _not_ endlessly precise. Apostles = 12 has no uncertainty, representing it as 12 ± 1 is wrong, but also 12 ± 0.5 is wrong.
It will be possibly to explicitly state the level of uncertainty, the demo is just for the mechanism for determining the default.
My proposal: make the default: plus-minus values unknown, only significant digits known.
I don't like "significant digits" because it depends on the writing system (base 10). I'd much rather express this as absolute values.
The interpretation of significant digits is not machine-available unless qualifiers say so. It can however be used to result in an estimate of significant digits after conversion.
That means that the figure is not usable for query answering at all. If we don't know the level of certainty, we cannot use the number.
Make the interval-points an option. If explicitly entered: excellent information. If not: don't try to create (false) knowledge from void.
Yes, it will be an option. Making the default "unknown" would be bad though, I think.
However, we should probably store whether the level of certainty was given explicitly or estimated automatically based on the number of significant digits - then we can still ignore automatic values when desired.
-- daniel