On Aug 28, 2012, at 2:17 PM, Joe Hourcle wrote:

> I seem to recall seeing a presentation a couple of years ago from someone in the intelligence community, where they'd keep all of their intelligence, but they stored RDF quads so they could track the source.
> 
> They'd then assign a confidence level to each source, so they could get an overall level of confidence on their inferences.
> […]
> It's possible that it was in the context of provenance, but I'm getting bogged down in too many articles about people storing provenance information using RDF-triples (without actually tracking the provenance of the triple itself)

Provenance is of great importance in the IC and related sectors.   

An good overview of the nature of evidential reasoning is David A Schum (1994;2001). Evidential Foundations of Probabilistic Reasoning. Wiley & Sons, 1994; Northwestern University Press, 2001 [Paperback edition].

There are usually papers on provenance and associated semantics at the GMU Semantic Technology for Intelligence, Defense, and Security (STIDS).  This years conference is 23 - 26 October 2012; see http://stids.c4i.gmu.edu/ for more details. 

Simon