In Achille Varzi & Laure Vieu (eds.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems. Proceedings of the Third International Conference (FOIS 2004). IOS Press (2004)
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Abstract |
Medical terminology collects and organizes the many different kinds of terms employed in the biomedical domain both by practitioners and also in the course of biomedical research. In addition to serving as labels for biomedical classes, these names reflect the organizational principles of biomedical vocabularies and ontologies. Some names represent invariant features (classes, universals) of biomedical reality (i.e., they are a matter for ontology). Other names, however, convey also how this reality is perceived, measured, and understood by health professionals (i.e., they belong to the domain of epistemology). We analyze terms from several biomedical vocabularies in order to throw light on the interactions between ontological and epistemological components of these terminologies. We identify four cases: 1) terms containing classification criteria, 2) terms reflecting detectability, modality, uncertainty, and vagueness, 3) terms created in order to obtain a complete partition of a given domain, and 4) terms reflecting mere fiat boundaries. We show that epistemology-loaded terms are pervasive in biomedical vocabularies, that the “classes” they name often do not comply with sound classification principles, and that they are therefore likely to cause problems in the evolution and alignment of terminologies and associated ontologies.
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Keywords | ontology vs. epistemology biomedical vocabularies classification biomedical informatics fiat boundary |
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Ontological Realism: A Methodology for Coordinated Evolution of Scientific Ontologies.Barry Smith & Werner Ceusters - 2010 - Applied ontology 5 (3):139-188.
Biomedical Ontologies.Barry Smith - forthcoming - In Peter Elkin (ed.), Terminology, Ontology and their Implementations. Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
Negative Findings in Electronic Health Records and Biomedical Ontologies: A Realist Approach.Werner Ceusters, Peter Elkin & Barry Smith - 2007 - International Journal of Medical Informatics 76 (3):S326-S333.
From Concepts to Clinical Reality: An Essay on the Benchmarking of Biomedical Terminologies.Barry Smith - 2006 - Journal of Biomedical Informatics 39 (3):288-298.
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