Sketches

[herdingbats]

Key elements:

• Preserve the text (artifact/evidence).
• Augment it with any interpretations/tokenization/inference but preserve the record of those augmentations. (These inferences/interpretations are append-only.)
• Build a network of relationships between entities, but always preserve the link to the evidence on which those relationships are inferred.

Sticking points:

• TIME. Entitles come into being and pass away. Perhaps the most intellectually honest way of handling the coming-into-being and passing-away is to define all dates as termini post or ante quem (perhaps with a precision level as well as a confidence level).
• Tangles. Creators of evidence are also objects of inference.
• How to make this useful. Preserving evidence will be a key point (starting point!), but helping a human detect and resolve obscure and or contradictory relationships is what we want this to do. Possibly start with the simpler goal of enabling a person to preserve evidence, augment it with interpretations and record the basis for those interpretations (some of which are human and some by computer).

[fgregg]

These are cool.