Ontology
An ontology that cannot doubt will defend a ghost
An ontology usually stores a sentence as true. Some sentences are weather, and the weather changes while the file stays proud.
01
The straight face
A store that keeps only the current sentence will answer a question about a closed shop as if the shop were open, for as long as nobody deletes the sentence. Deletion is a meeting. The meeting slips. The sentence stays, and the ontology answers with a straight face. It has no gear for a flinch.
02
A number we chose
One workable rule, chosen rather than discovered: a new sentence starts at 0.84. A marked error pulls 0.16 away. A proposed repair puts 0.12 back. The number stops at 0.98 on the way up and at 0.05 on the way down. At 0.84 the roof is sound enough to work under. Under 0.50 the sentence is a site, and two people may argue on it without either of them being told they are editing a law.
This is a house rule for a small ontology, not a result from a lab. It exists so a doubt has a chair.
03
A probability is one voice
In 2007 Luc De Raedt, Angelika Kimmig and Hannu Toivonen introduced ProbLog at IJCAI. A clause can belong to a program with a stated probability, and a query comes back with a success probability instead of a bare yes. That machine is different from a page on which the boldest sentence wins.
A small ontology can take the cheap part of the idea. Let a sentence record how many people stand by it, and how many have marked it wrong. A long paragraph is still one voice. Volume is one person typing.
On the record
Luc De Raedt, Angelika Kimmig and Hannu Toivonen, "ProbLog: A Probabilistic Prolog and Its Application in Link Discovery", IJCAI 2007, pages 2468-2473. A ProbLog program gives each clause a probability of belonging to a randomly sampled program.
IJCAI 2007
The steps 0.84, minus 0.16, plus 0.12, with a ceiling of 0.98 and a floor of 0.05, are a house scoring rule for a worked example. They are not a published standard.
House rule, this magazine
A store that keeps only the current triple loses the trace of a doubt once a later write replaces that triple.
Plain property of a last-write store