16. The computer program product of claim 14 , wherein the certainty terms comprise hedging terms or phrases indicative of a lack of certainty in the facts or conclusion specified in the evidential data, and wherein the computer readable program causes the computing device to calculate the confidence value for the hypothetical ontological link based on results of the evaluation of the set of evidential data at least by decreasing a confidence value for the hypothetical ontological link in response to detecting hedging terms or phrases in the evidential data.
14. A computer program product comprising a non-transitory computer readable medium having a computer readable program stored therein, wherein the computer readable program, when executed on a data processing system, causes the data processing system to be specifically configured to implement a hypothetical ontological link identification and evaluation engine that operates to: receive an ontology data structure based on a set of evidential data specifying a plurality of information concept entities and valid links representing known relationships between the information concept entities that are directly identified by direct evidence in the set of evidential data; generate a hypothetical ontological link between at least two information concept entities in the ontology data structure, wherein the hypothetical link is a link that does not have direct evidence in the evidential data directly identifying a direct link between the at least two information concept entities; evaluate the set of evidential data with regard to whether or not indirect evidence in the set of evidential data supports or refutes existence of the hypothetical ontological link, wherein the evaluation of the set of evidential data comprises analyzing language of natural language statements in the set of evidential data to identify certainty terms within the natural language statements; calculate a confidence value for the hypothetical ontological link based on results of the evaluation of the set of evidential data; and modify the ontology data structure to include the hypothetical ontological link as a new valid link in the ontology data structure in response to the knowledge output indicating the hypothetical ontological link to be a valid link between the at least two information concept objects in the ontology data structure.