EnvironmentOntology / envo

A community-driven ontology for the representation of environments
http://www.environmentontology.org
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NTR: abandoned coal mine #379

Open cmungall opened 7 years ago

cmungall commented 7 years ago

I would like to model chronic exposure to things like abandoned mines using the feature branch of ENVO

Examples of research into this kind of exposure:

One possibility is that I use a design pattern to post-composed abandoned + ENVO:00000070 ! constructed feature

This may be preferable to precomposing life-cycle modifiers for all constructed features. Either way we have to think of what the pattern is. This is similar to stages and structures in uberon.

One approach may be to have a generic abandoned place and model:

Another is to simply subclass:

The latter is probably simpler. It depends in part whether we want abandoned Xs to superclass-inherit properties of the generic X. At some stage in the life cycle (e.g. ruin), the X ceases to have the structural and functional properties that define an X.

Public-Health-Bioinformatics commented 7 years ago

I like the latter approach as well, as it brings one closer to a temporal narrative. Each at-stage is possibly within reach of another. Perhaps "state" is better than "stage"? "destroyed state" might be better than "destroyed stage". A finite state system which could include planning state, construction state, operational state, abandoned state, ruined state, renovated state, rebuilt state, even obliterated state?

cmungall commented 7 years ago

Yes, I think "stage" terminologically works for designed or evolved life cycles. For the former, see this ticket: https://github.com/SDG-InterfaceOntology/sdgio/issues/77

"state" is more neutral and doesn't imply any 'intention', so it's probably better for when we want to describe things that progress in non-deterministic ways

Public-Health-Bioinformatics commented 7 years ago

Just read SDG thread; I see the distinction between intentional planned process states and unintentional states. A mine accidentally flooded vs. say "abandoned" which with foresight would have been part of a plan (esp. in finite resource operations). I imagine a systems theory description that encompasses both planned states (stages) and unplanned but possible states would be useful.