Report of the “Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web” Incubator Group at W3C

The Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web Incubator Group has published its report “Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web”. The abstract of the report reads as follows:

In this report we present requirements for better defining the challenge of reasoning with and representing uncertain information available through the World Wide Web and related WWW technologies.

Specifically the report:

• identifies and describes situations on the scale of the World Wide Web for which uncertainty reasoning would significantly increase the potential for extracting useful information,
• identifies methodologies that can be applied to these situations and the fundamentals of a standardized representation that could serve as the basis for information exchange necessary for these methodologies to be effectively used,
• includes a set of use cases illustrating conditions under which uncertainty reasoning is important,
• provides an overview and discusses the applicability to the World Wide Web of prominent uncertainty reasoning techniques and the information that needs to be represented for effective uncertainty reasoning to be possible,
• includes a bibliography of work relevant to the challenge of developing standardized representations for uncertainty and exploiting them in Web-based services and applications.

The report identifies various areas which require further investigation and debate.