Situations, Information, and Evidence (Late Breaking Report)

We are concerned with information used as evidence for hypotheses of the identity of a culprit in a crime scene. We adapt Barwise’s situation theory: situations support information and carry information about other situations. An id-case is a constellation of situations involving one where an identity judgment is made. We here introduce the notion of a causal chain of information as a sequence of situations by which information is captured, managed, and communicated. An idcase is a confluence of such chains. Barwise discussed only one information-relevant action, viz., utterance, while we in this paper recognize many kinds and the objects they inform. We sketch our ontologies that provide the concepts used in encoding our cases.