BiodiversityOntologies / bco

Biological Collections Ontology
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Add logic for observations on parts of organisms #88

Open ramonawalls opened 6 years ago

ramonawalls commented 6 years ago

This is an issue for the PPO (but unfortunately not on github), which needs to make inferences about the presence or absence of structures on a whole plant based on an observation of a plant part, either from a herbarium specimen or from an image of a plant part. However, I think the logic is needed more broadly and should be included in BCO.

PPO has addressed this issue by creating a class called "portion of plant", which is a proper part of a plant or "derived" from a proper part of a plant (the actual relations are not yet specified, because they don't exist in RO yet). PPO logic infers that is a structure is present on a part of a plant, it must have been present on the whole plant. If a structure is absent from the plant part, you cannot make an inference about its presence on the whole plant.

I suggest that BCO create upper terms with a similar design pattern that could be used in PPO or for other organisms.

dr-shorthair commented 6 years ago

Geologists make observations on parts of a rock sample, with specific intentions related to the properties of the sample as a whole. E.g. some mineral grain with the sample may be useful for dating, or inferring the pressure of formation of the assemblage. Is this different?

robgur commented 6 years ago

Yes.

On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 1:42 AM Simon Cox notifications@github.com wrote:

Geologists make observations on parts of a rock sample, with specific intentions related to the properties of the sample as a whole. E.g. some mineral grain with the sample may be useful for dating, or inferring the pressure of formation of the assemblage. Is this different?

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ramonawalls commented 6 years ago

I think it is pretty similar. In the PPO example, we are trying to infer presence or absence, which requires some specific axioms, but the overall concept of inferring a quality of the whole based on the quality of a sample is the same, and worth considering.