How would you assign objective certainties to statements asserted by different users in an ontology?
For example, consider User A asserts "Bob's hat is blue" while User B asserts "Bob's hat is red". How would you determine if:
- User A and User B are referring to different people named Bob, and may or may not be correct.
- Both users are referring to the same person, but User A is right and User B is mistaken (or vice versa).
- Both users are referring to the same person, but User A is right and User B is lying (or vice versa).
- Both users are referring to the same person, and both uses are either mistaken or lying.
The main difficulty I see is the ontology doesn't have any way to obtain first-hand data (e.g. it can't ask Bob what color his hat is).
I realize there's probably no entirely objective way to resolve this. Are there any heuristics that could be employed? Does this problem have a formal name?