Hierarchy as a new data type for qualitative variables

The centroid or consensus of a set of objects with qualitative attributes

“…Work on confusionhas been reported elsewhere (Guzman & Levachkine, 2004a, 2004bLevachkine & Guzman-Arenas, 2007;Levachkine et al, 2005); this section is placed here for completeness, in order to understand Section 2. How close are two numeric values v 1 and v 2 ?…”

“…These are given elsewhere (Guzman & Levachkine, 2004a;Guzman & Levachkine, 2004b;Levachkine & Guzman-Arenas, 2007).…”

“…The theoretical properties and uses of conf are covered elsewhere (Guzman & Levachkine, 2004a, 2004bLevachkine & Guzman-Arenas, 2007;Levachkine et al, 2005); nevertheless, we distill some remarks here. Finding a good (or a better) metric for gauging the similarity of qualitative data.…”

“…The discomfort or disagreement when value r is reported instead of the ''true" value s (as found by the observer) is called the confusion in using r instead of s (Levachkine, Guzman-Arenas, & de Gyves, 2005;Levachkine & Guzman-Arenas, 2007). To measure this, it is necessary to give all observers the same context, that is, the same set of possible qualitative answers as well as how these are related 0957-4174/$ -see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.…”

Knowledge accumulation through automatic merging of ontologies

“…The function conf has been explained elsewhere (Levachkine & Guzman, 2007); we give here a short introduction, for completeness. conf(r, s) measures the confusion (a kind of error) when object r is used instead of the intended or real object s.…”