Michie, Susan;
West, Robert;
Hastings, Janna;
(2022)
Creating ontological definitions for use in science.
Qeios
10.32388/ygif9b.2.
(In press).
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Abstract
Ontologies aim to represent the world in terms of uniquely defined classes and their properties which are expressed as relationships with other classes. They are becoming widely used in science to improve clarity, searching, inference and the ability to link data from different sources. Ontological definitions are descriptions that represent the essential properties of classes of entities (which include objects, object attributes and processes) that distinguish them from other classes. Classes have unique IRIs (Internationalised Resource Identifiers) that can be used for searching; they also have labels which are words of phrases that people can use to identify the class in passages of text or tables. This article provides a brief guide to help with writing good ontological definitions. The standard format of such a definition of a class, A, is: ‘a B that C’ or its semantic equivalent, where A is the class being defined, B is a parent class and C describes a set of properties of A that distinguish it from other members of B.
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