question: gist:Category -> BFO ?

[justin2004]

hey @dylan-sa ,

what kind of thoughts do you have about making taxonomies (gist style using gist:Category) in bfo?
i saw your note here.

[dylan-sa]

@justin2004 -- This is a timely question -- something we are planning to discuss soon w/ our collaborators at Buffalo as we improve the mappings.

Some recent thoughts:

If BFO is an ontology of particulars, and instances of gist:Category are not particulars (but rather types of things or 'buckets'), then it's possible that gist:Category doesn't have a true superclass in BFO.

If there is a home for gist:Category in BFO, bfo:Quality and bfo:GenericallyDependentContinuant seem like the most plausible candidates. In CCO subclasses of bfo:Quality include things like 'eye color' and 'biological sex' which sound like paradigm subclasses of gist:Category. However, my understanding is that qualities in BFO are individuated by the things that bear them -- e.g., an instance of bfo:Quality might be :_EyeColor_Jim_green, not just :_EyeColor_green like w/ categories. But there might be another way for this to work...

I will keep you posted on where we land with this. And let us know if you have some thoughts!

[dylan-sa]

Tagging @johnbeve @giacomodecolle @FedeDon @kstudzin in case they'd like to add some thoughts on this one

[justin2004]

hey @dylan-sa ,

i appreciate you sharing the thinking.

i took a pass last week and here is what i did:

# the cbox
:CollaborativeSoftware a bfo:realizeable_entity  .
                      
:WikiSoftware a bfo:realizeable_entity ;
   skos:broader :CollaborativeSoftware . 

# abox
:SoftwareX  a cco:InformationProcessingArtifact   ;
  cco:designated_by [ a cco:DesignativeName ;
                                      cco:has_text_value "Software X Name Here" ] ;
  bfo:bearer_of :CollaborativeSoftware .

there i was thinking of bfo:bearer_of kind of like gist:categorizedBy

what do you think?
i feel like we are in the same neighboorhood since bfo:Quality and bfo:realizable_entity are siblings.

[dylan-sa]

i feel like we are in the same neighboorhood since bfo:Quality and bfo:realizable_entity are siblings.

I think so! If categories can be understood as qualities (pending my question related to eye color above), then I see no reason in principle why they couldn't be understood as realizable entities too. So maybe the question is whether Category is a subclass of bfo:SDC in general. Then it becomes a matter of placing the the subclasses of Category in their respective homes -- a category class like EyeColor would likely fall under bfo:quality, while something like Fragility would fall under bfo:disposition (and thus bfo:realizable_entity).

bfo:bearer_of makes sense to me here and doesn't violate domain/range constraints. In fact, it looks like we had made bearer_of a subproperty of gist:isCategorizedBy. (@kstudzin Maybe you were anticipating this pattern.)