Not necessarily Bret. It may be an 'hypothesis' that someone is wanting to share - to 'put it out there' to see if anyone agrees with it. Being able to mark something (using the Information reliability scale I posted earlier) as '3 - Possibly True' or '4 - Doubtfully True' then allows consumers to determine what level of confidence they want to assign to the information.
Ultimately each organization has its own criteria for determining what believes the truth to be. Information provided over STIX is just someones opinion. They are not facts (ok maybe some cybox objects are) but are reflections of conclusions that someone has decided upon. It's up to the consuming organization to decide what it thinks is the truth.
Consumers need to ask the following for each bit of information they receive:
- How reliable is the information source that gave me this data (source reliability)
- How reliable does the source think the data is (information reliability)
In my opinion as a consumer I should be collecting everyone's opinions, hypotheses and guesses, no matter how mad - and making my own determination as to what I think. I should be crowdsourcing everyones opinions. All information is important in gaining insight even if it's seemingly nonsense at the time. The important thing is to give people a way of [+1] or [-1] on other people's relationships so that bad relationships are downvoted and become less important, and good relationships are upvoted and become more important. This will allow consumers to adjust what they think is true over time, and reflect the true nature of intelligence gathering - trying to make sense of rumour and gossip. It also will allow people over time to determine which organizations they should be listening to, and which ones they should ignore. Kind of like how stackoverflow does things :).