[Data-modeling] Modeling uncertainty

[Tom Morris]

Is anyone doing work on modeling uncertainty?  I'm specifically
interested in dates and locations.

Location - If I'm told that something is "near" or "in the vicinity
of" a location, currently my choices are to either not record the fact
or to guess at a way to reduce the precision in a way that's still
accurate.  I could say that something which is "near Boston" is "in
Massachusetts," but a) that might not be true and b) that's not the
information that I have.

Dates - The simple case is "circa," but it would also be useful to
deal with both open and closed ranges (e.g. before 1945, after 1999,
or September 2008-December 2008).  Currently the only type of range
that can be encoded is ones which can be made by truncating precision
(ie 2009 == 1 Jan 2009 - 31 Dec 2009).

Tom