Peter Grobe

Accommodating Ontologies to Biological Reality—Top-Level Categories of Cumulative-Constitutively Organized Material Entities

Background The Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is a top-level formal foundational ontology for the biomedical domain. It has been developed with the purpose to serve as an ontologically consistent template for top-level categories of application oriented and domain reference ontologies within the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry (OBO). BFO is important for enabling OBO ontologies to facilitate in reliably communicating and managing data and metadata within and across biomedical databases. Following its intended single inheritance policy, BFOs three top-level categories of material entity (i.e. ‘object’, ‘fiat object part’, ‘object aggregate’) must be exhaustive and mutually disjoint. We have shown elsewhere that for accommodating all types of constitutively organized material entities, BFO must be extended by additional categories of material entity. Methodology/Principal Findings Unfortunately, most biomedical material entities are cumulative-constitutively organized. We show that even the extended BFO does not exhaustively cover cumulative-constitutively organized material entities. We provide examples from biology and everyday life that demonstrate the necessity for ‘portion of matter’ as another material building block. This implies the necessity for further extending BFO by ‘portion of matter’ as well as three additional categories that possess portions of matter as aggregate components. These extensions are necessary if the basic assumption that all parts that share the same granularity level exhaustively sum to the whole should also apply to cumulative-constitutively organized material entities. By suggesting a notion of granular representation we provide a way to maintain the single inheritance principle when dealing with cumulative-constitutively organized material entities. Conclusions/Significance We suggest to extend BFO to incorporate additional categories of material entity and to rearrange its top-level material entity taxonomy. With these additions and the notion of granular representation, BFO would exhaustively cover all top-level types of material entities that application oriented ontologies may use as templates, while still maintaining the single inheritance principle.

Fiat or bona fide boundary--a matter of granular perspective.

Background Distinguishing bona fide (i.e. natural) and fiat (i.e. artificial) physical boundaries plays a key role for distinguishing natural from artificial material entities and is thus relevant to any scientific formal foundational top-level ontology, as for instance the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). In BFO, the distinction is essential for demarcating two foundational categories of material entity: object and fiat object part. The commonly used basis for demarcating bona fide from fiat boundary refers to two criteria: (i) intrinsic qualities of the boundary bearers (i.e. spatial/physical discontinuity, qualitative heterogeneity) and (ii) mind-independent existence of the boundary. The resulting distinction of bona fide and fiat boundaries is considered to be categorial and exhaustive. Methodology/Principal Findings By referring to various examples from biology, we demonstrate that the hitherto used distinction of boundaries is not categorial: (i) spatial/physical discontinuity is a matter of scale and the differentiation of bona fide and fiat boundaries is thus granularity-dependent, and (ii) this differentiation is not absolute, but comes in degrees. By reducing the demarcation criteria to mind-independence and by also considering dispositions and historical relations of the bearers of boundaries, instead of only considering their spatio-structural properties, we demonstrate with various examples that spatio-structurally fiat boundaries can nevertheless be mind-independent and in this sense bona fide. Conclusions/Significance We argue that the ontological status of a given boundary is perspective-dependent and that the strictly spatio-structural demarcation criteria follow a static perspective that is ignorant of causality and the dynamics of reality. Based on a distinction of several ontologically independent perspectives, we suggest different types of boundaries and corresponding material entities, including boundaries based on function (locomotion, physiology, ecology, development, reproduction) and common history (development, heredity, evolution). We argue that for each perspective one can differentiate respective bona fide from fiat boundaries.

Top-Level Categories of Constitutively Organized Material Entities - Suggestions for a Formal Top-Level Ontology

Background Application oriented ontologies are important for reliably communicating and managing data in databases. Unfortunately, they often differ in the definitions they use and thus do not live up to their potential. This problem can be reduced when using a standardized and ontologically consistent template for the top-level categories from a top-level formal foundational ontology. This would support ontological consistency within application oriented ontologies and compatibility between them. The Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is such a foundational ontology for the biomedical domain that has been developed following the single inheritance policy. It provides the top-level template within the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry. If it wants to live up to its expected role, its three top-level categories of material entity (i.e., ‘object’, ‘fiat object part’, ‘object aggregate’) must be exhaustive, i.e. every concrete material entity must instantiate exactly one of them. Methodology/Principal Findings By systematically evaluating all possible basic configurations of material building blocks we show that BFOs top-level categories of material entity are not exhaustive. We provide examples from biology and everyday life that demonstrate the necessity for two additional categories: ‘fiat object part aggregate’ and ‘object with fiat object part aggregate’. By distinguishing topological coherence, topological adherence, and metric proximity we furthermore provide a differentiation of clusters and groups as two distinct subcategories for each of the three categories of material entity aggregates, resulting in six additional subcategories of material entity. Conclusions/Significance We suggest extending BFO to incorporate two additional categories of material entity as well as two subcategories for each of the three categories of material entity aggregates. With these additions, BFO would exhaustively cover all top-level types of material entity that application oriented ontologies may use as templates. Our result, however, depends on the premise that all material entities are organized according to a constitutive granularity.

Entry Life-Cycle with automatic Change-History & Provenance Tracking in collaborative Semantic Web Content Management Systems as implemented in SOCCOMAS

SOCCOMAS is a ready-to-use Semantic Ontology-Controlled Content Management S ystem (http://escience.biowikifarm.net/wiki/SOCCOMAS). Each web content management system (WCMS) run by SOCCOMAS is controlled by a set of ontologies and an accompanying Java-based middleware with the data housed in a Jena tuple store. The ontologies describe the behavior of the WCMS, including all of its input forms, input controls, data schemes and workflow processes (Fig. 1). ‡ § ‡ ‡ § ‡

Developing a Module for Generating Formalized Semantic Morphological Descriptions for Morph∙D∙Base

We demonstrate the early prototype of a new module for Morph·D·Base that allows the generation of highly formalized semantic morphological descriptions (http:// escience.biowikifarm.net/wiki/EScience-Compliant_Standards_for_Morphology). The resulting morphological descriptions follow the individuals-based Instance Anatomy data scheme (as opposed to the class-based Semantic Phenotypes data scheme). The module allows the description of a specimens anatomy by generating a granular representation of the parts of the specimen to be described, using ontology-terms from known ontologies. This results in a hierarchy of parts and subparts (partonomy), which serves as organizational backbone of the entire description, with each part representing a section of the description to which you can navigate using the partonomy. The module allows the description of each part from the partonomy using (1) a set of formalized input forms, which also allow the specification of metadata for each input field, (2) a text-widget for providing conventional free-text descriptions, which can be semantically enriched through annotating them with ontology-terms of (user-)selected ontologies, and (3) an image-widget for linking images, which allows semantically enriching each image by specifying regions of interest and annotating them with ontology-terms of (user-)selected ontologies. This new module is ‡ ‡ § § § § ‡