Modeling uncertainty

[stephenhart8]

In the present 2.1 Target Model, there is no pattern to model uncertainty in the data. By uncertainty, I mean data that is existing, but unsure about its certainty. It is different from the absence of data (see issue #22). This uncertainty about one information could mean that one or multiple uncertain options, that could be inclusive or exclusive.

Let's take for example the address of John. In my opinion, there are 3 different possibilities of uncertainty:

• The address of John is probably Montreal, but it could be any other city: one option, inclusive
• The address of John is either Montreal or Ottawa, but no other city: multiple options, exclusive
• The address of John could be Montreal or Ottawa, but can also be any other city: multiple options, inclusive

It would be also interesting to add some coefficients to the certainty. For example, the certainty of John living in Montreal is 80% and living in Ottawa 20%.

As I've said in issue #22, I've come across some interesting researches by the Antike Fundmünzel in Europa about managing uncertain data, published at the CAA:

• Karsten Tolle, David Wigg-Wolf, "Uncertainty Handling for Ancient Coinage", in CAA2014: 21st Century Archaeology, Concepts, Methods and Tools - Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, Oxford:Archaeopress, pp. 171-178
• Karsten Tolle, David Wigg-Wolf, "Uncertain information, the Dark Matter of archaeology – use cases from numismatics" in CAA2019, not yet published

They propose multiple solutions, including:

• RDF reification
• CIDOC CRM E13 Attribute Assignment
• Using the Uncertainty Ontology of the W3C (the solution they chose)

Also in issue #22, @VladimirAlexiev added the following links:

• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Visual_arts/Item_structure#Use_of_creator_(P170)_in_uncertain_cases
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Property_proposal/Attribution_Qualifier
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:WikiProject_Visual_arts/Item_structure#Attribution_Qualifiers

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I have not yet thought of a possible mapping pattern for this topic, but I leave this issue here for further discussions.

[VladimirAlexiev]

My links above are specifically about uncertainty of authorship. Here's how we modeled similar things for the British Museum in ResearchSpace in 2013-2014: https://confluence.ontotext.com/display/ResearchSpace/BM+Association+Mapping+v2#BMAssociationMappingv2-ProducedByCloselyRelatedGroup