Hi all, I just wanted to get back at what Dennis said at the beginning of this thread. Im quite curious how you will get people to agree on (un)certainty. If feels like a very natural idea to talk and think about, but I haven't really seen it function properly in practice.
We once did an experiment where we had 10 people who were used to entering data in our archaeological inventory system enter the same site. We paired the archaeologists: one more more experienced data entry person (a few years experience) and one newbie (a few months), so they would be forced to really think things through and discuss. In our database we have a field for certain the data entry person is about the location of the site, ie. about the polygon they might have drawn on a map. This field only allowed 5 choices, ranging from 1 (I'm sure it's exactly where it needs to be) to 5 (I have no idea whatsoever where the site is). We had a very detailed manual with examples of all these cases, what to use when, ... Final result of our experiment: every group had entered the location with a different level of certainty. So, based on the exact same information they had all drawn totally different conclusions. And this was about something as simple as the location of the site. So, I'm very curious about how you manage to prevent stuff like this from happening. The other thing I wonder about: how does certainty affect searching? Should a search for 'churches' only return sites that have a certain "certainty" attached to the interpretation? Are you working with sliding scale of certainty (ie. we are 75% percent certain about this statement) or a binary one (we're certain or uncertain)? Cheers, Koen ________________________________________ Van: archesproject@googlegroups.com [archesproject@googlegroups.com] namens dwuthr...@fargeo.com [dwuthr...@fargeo.com] Verzonden: donderdag 27 maart 2014 22:36 Aan: thomas.enge...@gmail.com CC: archesproject@googlegroups.com Onderwerp: Re: [Arches] "uncertain information" in Arches Thomas, Good question! You are quite correct that we haven't tried to include uncertainty in Arches. One reason is pretty basic: certainty is quite subjective from person to person. For example: most people agree that the earth is spherical. But a "flat-earther" may be very certain that the earth is not a sphere, but is instead a plane. His certainty does not make him correct, it merely states the degree to which he believes in his interpretation. Clearly, you can be very certain and very wrong at the same time. I guess my point is that in many cases "certainty" says more about the person making the assertion than it does about the thing being described. OK, all philosophy aside, one could easily extend any Arches graph to include a "certainty node". Such a node could point to a thesaurus (as many of the nodes in Arches already do), allowing a user to select from a list of "uncertainty levels". Really, any Arches graph could include a "certainty node" under any entity that you might want to qualify (for example, one certainty node for period and another certainty node for heritage type). Really, the hard part is not in getting Arches to allow you to add an "uncertainty level" to your cultural heritage data. Rather, the difficult thing is to decide how you'll get different people to agree on what constitutes certain vs. uncertain interpretations of heritage. Sorry that I can't be any more helpful... However, I'm very interested to hear how you will model uncertainty and how you will get people to implement it consistently. Please keep me posted! Cheers, Dennis On Mar 27, 2014, at 2:41, thomas.enge...@gmail.com<mailto:thomas.enge...@gmail.com> wrote: I have a question about conceptual modeling in CIDOC CRM, maybe there is someone one the list who is able to provide some guidance. As posted before, we are trying to integrate research data of neolithic sites into Arches. Now, naturally a significant part of this data has a level of "certainty" to which the information is correct. e.g. a site can consist of some features for certain (in this case modeled in the Archaeological Heritage (Site).E27 - Component.E18 relationship) but if others exist is uncertain. We believe this valuable information should not get lost (quite often theory construction is based on such information). For example it could be uncertain if an archaeological feature is to be named "pit" or "ditch" - or if it exists at all. Another example could be the questionable relationship of a findspot to a certain archaeological period. To make it even more difficult, different authors could have different thoughts on that. As far as we can see, the expression of such "uncertainty" is not covered by Arches yet. Is there a concept for the integration of such data in the future? We are currently thinking into potential solutions but are struggeling to find adequate expressions for uncertain information in CIDOC. thanks, Thomas -- -- To post, send email to archesproject@googlegroups.com<mailto:archesproject@googlegroups.com>. To unsubscribe, send email to archesproject+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com<mailto:archesproject+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com>. 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