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EnvironmentOntology / envo

A community-driven ontology for the representation of environments
http://www.environmentontology.org
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Rates of environmental processes and the entity-attribute approach #323

Open pbuttigieg opened 8 years ago

pbuttigieg commented 8 years ago

@cmungall Following from #316, we'd like to pre-coordinate expressions to handle things like "wind speed" or "rainfall intensity" using the entity-attribute approach.

cmungall commented 8 years ago

I'm going to make some slight adjustments to the DOSDPs to make them more aligned with what I'm doing in https://github.com/cmungall/environmental-conditions/ -- minor things such as switching the TSVs to CSVs

We'll probably add a new pattern for process-attribute pairs

cmungall commented 8 years ago

Some examples here:

https://github.com/EnvironmentOntology/envo/blob/master/src/envo/modules/process_attribute.csv

We may need to think about things like wind speed. This is really an aggregate quality of the material entity?

pbuttigieg commented 8 years ago

We may need to think about things like wind speed. This is really an aggregate quality of the material entity?

These seem to be more process centred than participant centred. Speed doesn't sound like it can inhere in a material entity the same way as colour; it depends more on the process that the entity is participating in.

dillerm commented 1 year ago

We may need to think about things like wind speed. This is really an aggregate quality of the material entity?

I almost opened an issue to ask this very question. I noticed y'all have 'atmospheric wind speed' and 'speed of a water current' as subclasses of 'speed', which is a movement quality. However, when I think about velocity, my first inclination is to say that what we are talking about is the measurement of the rate of movement of something.

So, one might re-define 'atmospheric wind speed' as follows:

A measurement datum that is about the rate at which some atmospheric wind occurs.

Although this is typically presented in meters per second (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_speed#Units) and is a scalar value, meteorologists are often also interested in the vertical and horizontal wind speeds, which are vector values. Based on my understanding, vertical wind speed can also be presented in terms of pressure coordinates (Pa • s^-1). I only mention all this because it might influence whether you'd want to classify 'vertical atmospheric wind speed' as a subclass of 'atmospheric wind speed', which would affect whether the latter is classified as a scalar measurement datum or a measurement datum.