On 20.12.2012 20:59, Avenue wrote:
Thanks, the prototype helps make some this more concrete.
I am increasingly wondering if "uncertainty" will be overloaded here. People seem to want to use it for various types of measurement uncertainty (e.g. the standard error), ranges with no defined central value, and distributional summaries (e.g. max and min), as well as for the precision with which a value is entered (as in the "auto-certainty" value in the prototype). These are all quite different beasts, and conflating them will probably lead to problems -
The idea is to allow for the detailed information as qualifiers, while using the "conflated" uncertainty for query answering. Ideally, for queries, we need a single value. The current solution would be use a single value plus a range of uncertainty for answering queries, so "Primates taller than 1m" will include a species said to be 90+/-20cm or something.
-- daniel