I've just been looking at the knowledge addition logs and one of our users, Nomlas, is adding knowledge about the TV series The Clangers and Bagpuss. It's nice to start the evening with a bit of nostalgia. Other users have been adding the prehistoric aeons and eras, and lots of facts about Oscar winners.
Inside the company we've been getting our "levels of precision" knowledge organised. Lots of things can be more or less accurate versions of other objects - for example the real number 1.9999 can be written less accurately as 2. There are some less familiar examples too, such as colours. If one person describes an object as red and another says that it is crimson then both descriptions can be true, but one is more precise than the other.
Some types of facts need the data to be precise, but other facts can be true with varying degrees of precision. For example, saying "I live in Cambridgeshire" and "I live in the UK" are both true because Cambridgeshire is a more accurate version of the UK, but if you're the political leader of a particular place then it is false to say that you're the leader of the place containing it.
This type of fuzziness was already working within the system for some classes (eg numbers, dates and places). We've been trying to finish the job by deciding exactly what other types of objects can have a less accurate form and which can't, deciding which relationships between objects ought to permit fuzziness, and filling in the gaps in the inference to make it all work across the whole knowledge base.
What about subjective knowledge e.g.: Is Kosovo a country? Are the Malvinas part of Argentina? How old is the Earth? (Sarah Palin may say 6000 yrs)
Posted by: Simon | 07 November 2008 at 05:32 PM
With the Kosovo question we get round it by using three different definitions of country, and asking the user exactly which of them they mean.
With the other two, users are allowed to contradict and endorse facts if they disagree or agree with them, with the people who've contributed the most to the knowledge base carrying the highest weight. So anyone who cares a lot about facts like those can fight it out among themselves.
Posted by: Beth | 07 November 2008 at 10:42 PM
Is there any equivalent to the Wikipedia style discussion pages where "Revert wars" can be diffused?
Posted by: Simon | 10 November 2008 at 01:58 PM
There's a forum where people can discuss things. We haven't actually had a controversy yet but if we did then we would probably start a forum thread for it.
Posted by: Beth | 10 November 2008 at 02:08 PM
@Simon, discussion around facts (similar to Wikipedia) is something we are thinking about; we are looking to introduce more social features over time where it makes sense to have them.
Posted by: Nick Franklin | 11 November 2008 at 11:10 AM