definition
definition
2012-04-05:
Barry Smith
The official OBI definition, explaining the meaning of a class or property: 'Shall be Aristotelian, formalized and normalized. Can be augmented with colloquial definitions' is terrible.
Can you fix to something like:
A statement of necessary and sufficient conditions explaining the meaning of an expression referring to a class or property.
Alan Ruttenberg
Your proposed definition is a reasonable candidate, except that it is very common that necessary and sufficient conditions are not given. Mostly they are necessary, occasionally they are necessary and sufficient or just sufficient. Often they use terms that are not themselves defined and so they effectively can't be evaluated by those criteria.
On the specifics of the proposed definition:
We don't have definitions of 'meaning' or 'expression' or 'property'. For 'reference' in the intended sense I think we use the term 'denotation'. For 'expression', I think we you mean symbol, or identifier. For 'meaning' it differs for class and property. For class we want documentation that let's the intended reader determine whether an entity is instance of the class, or not. For property we want documentation that let's the intended reader determine, given a pair of potential relata, whether the assertion that the relation holds is true. The 'intended reader' part suggests that we also specify who, we expect, would be able to understand the definition, and also generalizes over human and computer reader to include textual and logical definition.
Personally, I am more comfortable weakening definition to documentation, with instructions as to what is desirable.
We also have the outstanding issue of how to aim different definitions to different audiences. A clinical audience reading chebi wants a different sort of definition documentation/definition from a chemistry trained audience, and similarly there is a need for a definition that is adequate for an ontologist to work with.
GROUP:OBI:<http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/obi>
PERSON:Daniel Schober
The official definition, explaining the meaning of a class or property. Shall be Aristotelian, formalized and normalized. Can be augmented with colloquial definitions.
definition
editor note
An administrative note intended for its editor. It may not be included in the publication version of the ontology, so it should contain nothing necessary for end users to understand the ontology.
GROUP:OBI:<http://purl.obfoundry.org/obo/obi>
PERSON:Daniel Schober
editor note
imported from
has curation status
OBI_0000281
PERSON:Alan Ruttenberg
PERSON:Bill Bug
PERSON:Melanie Courtot
has curation status
definition source
Discussion on obo-discuss mailing-list, see http://bit.ly/hgm99w
GROUP:OBI:<http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/obi>
PERSON:Daniel Schober
definition source
formal citation, e.g. identifier in external database to indicate / attribute source(s) for the definition. Free text indicate / attribute source(s) for the definition. EXAMPLE: Author Name, URI, MeSH Term C04, PUBMED ID, Wiki uri on 31.01.2007
term editor
20110707, MC: label update to term editor and definition modified accordingly. See https://github.com/information-artifact-ontology/IAO/issues/115.
GROUP:OBI:<http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/obi>
Name of editor entering the term in the file. The term editor is a point of contact for information regarding the term. The term editor may be, but is not always, the author of the definition, which may have been worked upon by several people
PERSON:Daniel Schober
term editor
alternative term
An alternative name for a class or property which means the same thing as the preferred name (semantically equivalent)
GROUP:OBI:<http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/obi>
PERSON:Daniel Schober
alternative term
editor preferred term
GROUP:OBI:<http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/obi>
PERSON:Daniel Schober
The concise, meaningful, and human-friendly name for a class or property preferred by the ontology developers. (US-English)
editor preferred term
example of usage
A phrase describing how a term should be used and/or a citation to a work which uses it. May also include other kinds of examples that facilitate immediate understanding, such as widely know prototypes or instances of a class, or cases where a relation is said to hold.
GROUP:OBI:<http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/obi>
PERSON:Daniel Schober
example
data item
2/2/2009 Alan and Bjoern discussing FACS run output data. This is a data item because it is about the cell population. Each element records an event and is typically further composed a set of measurment data items that record the fluorescent intensity stimulated by one of the lasers.
2014-03-31: See discussion at http://odontomachus.wordpress.com/2014/03/30/aboutness-objects-propositions/
2009-03-16: data item deliberatly ambiguous: we merged data set and datum to be one entity, not knowing how to define singular versus plural. So data item is more general than datum.
2009-03-16: removed datum as alternative term as datum specifically refers to singular form, and is thus not an exact synonym.
Data items include counts of things, analyte concentrations, and statistical summaries.
JAR: datum -- well, this will be very tricky to define, but maybe some
information-like stuff that might be put into a computer and that is
meant, by someone, to denote and/or to be interpreted by some
process... I would include lists, tables, sentences... I think I might
defer to Barry, or to Brian Cantwell Smith
JAR: A data item is an approximately justified approximately true approximate belief
PERSON: Alan Ruttenberg
PERSON: Chris Stoeckert
PERSON: Jonathan Rees
a data item is an information content entity that is intended to be a truthful statement about something (modulo, e.g., measurement precision or other systematic errors) and is constructed/acquired by a method which reliably tends to produce (approximately) truthful statements.
data
data item
information content entity
2014-03-10: The use of "thing" is intended to be general enough to include universals and configurations (see https://groups.google.com/d/msg/information-ontology/GBxvYZCk1oc/-L6B5fSBBTQJ).
A generically dependent continuant that is about some thing.
Examples of information content entites include journal articles, data, graphical layouts, and graphs.
OBI_0000142
PERSON: Chris Stoeckert
information content entity
information_content_entity 'is_encoded_in' some digital_entity in obi before split (040907). information_content_entity 'is_encoded_in' some physical_document in obi before split (040907).
Previous. An information content entity is a non-realizable information entity that 'is encoded in' some digital or physical entity.