has part
information content entity
identifier
code set
Clint Dowland
Sarah Bost
William R. Hogan
Matt Diller
Alan Ruttenberg
Alan Ruttenberg
An information content entity that is a collection of other information content entities that has been created to identify or annotate things in a specified domain, and where the intention of its creators is that the collection has a one-to-one correspondence with those things.
Code sets might include non-entities/things (e.g. missing thumbs).
Does not imply absence vs. presence of any taxonomy.
Does not imply that aggregated entities denote particulars, universals, or defined classes (a.k.a. attributive collections) or even that they denote only one of these three types of entities.
Each aggregated entity is often (but not necessarily) associated with a text string—variously called a “description,” “name,” “title,” or “label”—that helps humans reach the target of denotation.
When there is no such string, it is almost always because the entities take the form of human language words. For example, a “sex” or “gender” code set could contain “MALE” and “FEMALE,” or even “M” and “F” (by convention, we understand what these mean).
For National Drug Codes (NDCs) and similar code sets, there doesn’t even have to be a single, fully-concretized copy somewhere (for example, for NDCs there is no centralized database or repository where they all live as one instance of concretization of code set). The code set can be “distributively” concretized. This seems like an unusual exception, but it also likely applies to Universal Product Codes (UPCs) and their follow on Global Trade Item Numbers (GTINs).
For each given domain, there can potentially exist multiple code sets. The multiplicity of code sets is partially due to the different specific purposes of those code sets.
Justin Whorton
Many code sets are created for a specific purpose in addition to merely identifying or annotating core ideas of a specified domain.
Mathias Brochhausen
The information content entities do not denote each other.
code map
code system
codeset
coding system
controlled vocabulary
https://github.com/information-artifact-ontology/IAO/issues/237