Dear All,
agree partly with Ian's assessment, i.e. about the messiness. While I
much appreciate what I have read, and I've had much help from earlier
texts from the authors (as I'm sure I will from this book), there is in
the medical informatics community a widespread belief that the position
held by (some part of) the BFO community is undisputed and sort-of
final. There are still issues which requires careful consideration,
especially regarding information artefacts and the is-about relationship
[1, 2], but also about e.g. dispositions [3], and functions [4].
Additionally, while ontologies deal with what is universally true, it is
my belief that universal truth takes, and should take, the back seat
compared to user needs and practicality in information modelling.
First-world (using Popper's ontology [5]) ontologies are outcomes of our
understanding of the physical world and evolve as science evolves (at
least good ones). Information models and other second-third-world
ontologies are always constructs and, like with fictional characters,
nothing can be discovered by examining those models in addition to what
has been explicitly stated. For this reason, ontology as a method isn't
as helpful for information modellers as it is for others.
1.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266021648_An_Ontological_Analysis_of_Reference_in_Health_Record_Statements
2. http://www.amazon.com/Aboutness-Carl-G-Hempel-Lecture/dp/0691144958
3. http://www.amazon.com/Dispositions-Stephen-Mumford/dp/0199259828
4.
http://www.amazon.com/Functions-Biological-Artificial-Worlds-Philosophical/dp/026211321X
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popper%27s_three_worlds
/Daniel
On 2015-09-07 10:54, Ian McNicoll wrote:
Me too - nice bed-time reading.
I will reserve judgement for the "2-5 years and we will be using
this". I agree this is the future but it still feels a lot like
nuclear fusion to me - nice to have but a b****r to use (at least in
our messy world of clinical documentation).
Ian
Dr Ian McNicoll
mobile +44 (0)775 209 7859
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Co-Chair, openEHR Foundation [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
Director, freshEHR Clinical Informatics Ltd.
Director, HANDIHealth CIC
Hon. Senior Research Associate, CHIME, UCL
On 7 September 2015 at 09:17, Rikard Lövström
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Thank you, Thomas, this looks very promising. I have placed an
order so now I am waiting :-) Very considerate of you, many
thanks. Kind regards, Rikard
2015-09-07 3:26 GMT+02:00 Thomas Beale
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>:
A new book, *Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology
*(BFO2) has been published by Robert Arp, Barry Smith and
Andrew Spear.
Amazon.com
<http://www.amazon.com/Building-Ontologies-Basic-Formal-Ontology/dp/0262527812/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1441588367&sr=8-1&keywords=basic+formal+ontology>
Amazon.co.uk
<http://www.amazon.co.uk/Building-Ontologies-Basic-Formal-Ontology/dp/0262527812/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1441588327&sr=8-1&keywords=basic+formal+ontology>
I've read a pre-print, and this is an excellent book. Many of
us here have studied or used some of the key upper level
ontologies (BFO, BioTopLite etc), and I think BFO2 will
probably end up being the one of choice for general
biomedicine. It contains all the concepts from Barry Smith's
earlier work (SNAP and SPAN - spatial and temporal regions,
partonomy concepts etc) and will ultimately (I have been told)
contain/be merged with a new version of the Information
Artefact Ontology (IAO) which will probably become the upper
level ontology for describing types of information that stand
in the IS-ABOUT and similar relationships with real world
referents - in other words, EHR information items.
My personal feeling is that in the next 2-5 years, we will
finally see the joining up of these key ontologies with
information models and archetypes in the clinical information
space. It will be up to us in the openEHR community and other
related communities (13606, CIMI, HL7 etc) to engage with this
material and consider how this integration will be achieved. A
few very early ideas are mentioned in the Archetype Technology
Overview
<http://www.openehr.org/releases/AM/latest/docs/Overview/Overview.html#_identification_and_the_virtual_archetype_space>document,
but of course this is just one narrow area of application.
We need to all get on the same page in terms of understanding
and conceptual nomenclature in this space, and BFO2 I believe
is an excellent foundation for that. We will be using it
increasingly in the openEHR specification space, and I think
others will find it useful as well.
- thomas
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Daniel Karlsson, PhD, sr lecturer
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Linköping University
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Sweden
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