RE: Evidence for backing statements

This would be a good time to begin collecting use-cases from HCLS for the URW (Uncertainty Reasoning for the Web, http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/urw3/) incubator group involving uncertainty, beliefs and probabilities...

I see several potential categories of uncertainty, some around the current reification discussions; here's a starter list that is by no means exhaustive:

1. Annotations and belief statements: these may always be uncertain (though over time their uncertainty may reduce), yet they may never have an globally agreed probability associated with them. e.g.,  It would depend on how much a particular consumer values a particular annotation coming form a particular research group-- let each consumer determine there own certainty weighting...

2. A data set from clinical findings or microarrays that is analytically processed using a statistical package, and the resulting relations may have confidence intervals and p-values associated with them (student pair test, Z-scores, non-parametric ests, F-statsitic cluster scores, etc).

3. OWL-based classifications that are proposed but not fully-tested or validated yet, e.g., whether patient Z's disease symptom W are indicative of a new disease class or not. This will be closely aligned with evolving ontologies.

4. ??? 

Again, I'll mention my personal view that within HCLS, most RDF statements (possibly all) are really beliefs that may eventually be proven false. Hence we would need to explicitly state that such RDF statements follow KD45 modal logic constraints (one can say something that may be later proven false, but for now the author honestly does not know this), rather than S5 (only truthful statements can be made). 

In other words, am I correct to assume that within HCLS, all RDF statements we are considering are not facts, but assertions, that may in the future be proven false, but never proven true?


Eric