February 17-19, Gainesville, Florida

Workshop overview

The workshop was held in Gainesville, Florida – hometown – very convenient.  Organized by Bill Hogan of the University of Florida and Barry Smith of the University of Buffalo and sponsored by the respective CTSAs, the workshop brought together invited experts to share work on the representations of social entities, using BFO, IAO, d_acts and other relevant ontologies in the context of biomedical research.  Participants, presenters, materials available here: http://ncorwiki.buffalo.edu/index.php/Workshop_on_BFO_and_the_Ontology_of_Social_Entities_2016

Day 1

Barry Smith presented his work on representing "promises" – deontic logic and the BFO.  Obligations, duties, responsibilities, sanctions and their relationships to Obligee and Obligor.  A lively discussion of cases and meaning, disposition, realization, culture, social environment, speech acts, document acts, mutual dependence, mutual deontic dependence, the relationship to documents and organizations, the implications for representation of contracts, charters, consent.  Hohlfeldt's legal constructs – the power to bring about legal relationships.  Nature of Command.  document-driven HealthCare, LabTest Order as "promise".  Obligations of office holders, and the org chart as representation of deontic relationships.

Day 2

A series of talks on deontic representation in biomedicine:

• Mathias Brochhausen – Document Acts and their role in biomedicine – informed consent documents and associated acts
• Bill Hogan – Demographics and the Ontology of Medically Relevant Social Entities (OMRSE).  See https://github.com/ufbmi/OMRSE
• Amanda Hicks – Insurance, insurance policies, relation to BFO and deontic logic
• Ludgar Hansen – consent forms
• Selja Seppala – systematizing definitions of social entities
• Peter Koch – Patient Welfare
• Desiree Daniel – Representation of power and power dynamics

Day 3

I presented VIVO – software, ontologies, data, community. Talk is available here:  https://figshare.com/articles/Representing_Scholars_and_Scholarship/2442313.  Great interest in the goals of VIVO, the information representation, use of BFO and IAO, potential for improvement in representations.  Use of ontologies.  Use of VIVO and VIVO data.  Availability of UF and other VIVO data.  Interest in the use of VIVO for CTSA evaluation.  Great interest in Open VIVO.  Suggestion to use http://okkam.org IRI.  Suggestion to investigate http://coremine.com Interest in further collaboration.

The group discussed upcoming meetings and presentation including their next workshop at Buffalo in September.

Recommended Reading

Building Ontologies with the Basic Formal Ontology http://www.amazon.com/Building-Ontologies-Basic-Formal-Ontology/dp/0262527812