Jeni's Musings

Some interesting musings on certainty, especially with regards to genealogy, here. I myself have played around with trying to apply a modified version of the Gentech data model in RDF to describe genealogical facts as a side project in a Semantic Web class recently given by Jim Hendler. I’ve also played around with ontologies for this purpose by interacting with Hilton of the Distributed Family Tree project.

In any case, with a particular look into certainty, it’s interesting that there’s really two different paradigms here that interact. Reliability of a fact from the document and reliability of a document itself are rather closely related (as they are based on documentary evidence), but reliability of a researcher’s evidence is a secondary scale that qualifies the entire previous reliability, almost like an annotation on the researcher than annotation on the assertion itself.

As for my own experiences with attempting to implement reliability, they are rather disparate: My experience with DFT did not directly relate or deal with reliability, though some conceptualization there mostly dealt with a related, but not identical, concept of proofs of certainty, especially using named graphs for indicating provenance, and presumably certainty as well.

My independent project had less to apply with regards to certainty (I didn’t move far enough into the Gentech schemata to really be able to explore how that would be denoted.) but instead applied rules-based logic through cwm to attempt to derive information from assertions. This might not in and of itself be directly useful to producing useful certainty values, but the general idea of using custom rules to qualify individual certainty of assertions might be beneficial in a Web 2.0 format. In particular, people might want to filter assertions made based on individual aspects of rated certainty as well as judging assertions based on the number of supporting pieces of evidence of a given certainty. It might be worthwhile to look into this…

On a somewhat different vein, it seems almost quaintly coincidental that I ran into some of your other work when trying to solve another issue with trying to hold genealogical data in an RDF format: namely your work on DTLL, and trying to apply it to unambiguously specify dates in formats other than (proleptic) Gregorian dating, especially in cases where imported GEDCOM data might have non-Gregorian dating systems. I’m not sure what, if any, work might have been done to link RDF datatyping with DTLL, and that was something I’m personally eager to look into… But I ramble on.

In any case, I hope that there was SOME sort of usefulness to be gleaned from my comment, but if there isn’t… Well at least it’s not spam. :-)