organization = artifact?

[Bjoern Peters]

I am in the process of drawing an overall OBI core hierarchy. Looking at
it, I wonder if organization shouldn't be an artifact, in the sense that
it is necessarily created by humans. It does not however match the
'manufacturing' view of looking at other artifact creation processes...

[Melanie Courtot]

On 27-Jan-09, at 3:23 PM, Bjoern Peters wrote:

>
> I am in the process of drawing an overall OBI core hierarchy.

Great :)

> Looking at
> it, I wonder if organization shouldn't be an artifact, in the sense
> that
> it is necessarily created by humans. It does not however match the
> 'manufacturing' view of looking at other artifact creation
> processes...

I think we should keep artifact for the manufacturing process, and
would not classify organization as an artifact object. I would say
that artifacts objects are specifically engineered, whereas for
organization we mean the legal aspect by "created by humans".

This made me think about selecting a population, is that selecting
process an artifact material creation?
For example:
- selecting people between 30 and 40 for a study
- selecting cells based on antibiotic resistance

I would say that a population is not an artifact object, and it should
probably be removed from under entity of organismal origin.

Melanie



>
>
>
>
> >

[Alan Ruttenberg]

As you can probably predict, I think artifact has gotten too big. So
big that I no longer have good intuitions about it.
Check out http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Aartifact
I think that organization would classify under social artifact among
those definitions.

Personally, I think we'd be better off without it. (you can ignore me
on this, if you like)

-Alan

[Frank Gibson]

I think I agree with everybody here. It probably would/should classify
under artifact, but I would like to see this done by the reasoner,
which we would need processes which would define the legal process of
creating an organisation. As far as OBI is concerned I think this
would be uneccessary to go this far. Maybe adding an editor not to
organisation to this effect would suffice.

Frank

--
Frank Gibson, PhD
http://peanutbutter.wordpress.com/

[James Malone]

Bjoern, thanks for looking at this, I was wondering if anyone would put
the core stuff together. Are you putting this together as a slide
Bjoern or in an actual OWL file?

I'm in agreement with some of the thoughts here. Regarding artifact,
I'm also tending to think this is now overloaded. This covers a lot and
I'm not sure it adds a lot of value to place a lot of human made things
under there. A quick look at our old friend Wikipedia reveals a
plethora of ways people use the concept
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artifact and I agree with Alan, that we
should perhaps consider different concepts associated with the word,
such as social artifact (i think closest wikipedia is cultural
artifact), and we have artifact material already. And I've only just
noticed we have a 3rd 'artifact' in IAO this time. When was that sucked
up?

Along same lines is there a procedure for removing a term from OBI and
putting it into IAO? We have a policy for obsoleteness in OBI which is
to email around and make sure everyone is aware, this should be followed
if classes move from OBI into IAO (and the OBI class disappears). Also,
why is 'material entity' in IAO?

Cheers,

James

--
European Bioinformatics Institute,
Wellcome Trust Genome Campus,
Hinxton,
Cambridge, CB10 1SD,
United Kingdom
Tel: + 44 (0) 1223 494 676
Fax: + 44 (0) 1223 492 468

[Alan Ruttenberg]

> And I've only just
> noticed we have a 3rd 'artifact' in IAO this time. When was that sucked
> up?

Looks like it was put there in the transfer. I'll remove it.

> Along same lines is there a procedure for removing a term from OBI and
> putting it into IAO? We have a policy for obsoleteness in OBI which is
> to email around and make sure everyone is aware, this should be followed
> if classes move from OBI into IAO (and the OBI class disappears).

Agreed. The OBI class shouldn't disappear, though, it should be
obsoleted. Perhaps this one slipped through the cracks.

> Also, why is 'material entity' in IAO?

Melanie fobbed it off on IAO ;-)
Will be part of BFO 1.2.

-Alan

[Bjoern Peters]

I will fight hard to retain 'artifact object' as a class. It is to me
the single most useful high level separation we have under material
entity. It reflects ages of discussion we had on 'natural',
_bio_-material, 'synthetic' etc. It will serve us well to distinguish
from what goes into OBI and what goes into other OBO ontologies, as all
material entities that are not an artifacts should in the long term go
into another ontology.

Regarding multiple meanings for 'artifact' in google / wiki: a) the
argument sucks, as in: would you apply it to the class 'cell'? b) there
are actually just two main meanings (leaving out band names and
'Iatrogenic artifact
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iatrogenic_artifact>'). The others are
subclasses thereof:

- entity that was created by humans

* Artifact (archaeology)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artifact_%28archaeology%29>, any
object made or modified by a human culture, and later recovered by
an archaeological endeavor
* Artifact (software development)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artifact_%28software_development%29>,
one of many kinds of tangible byproduct produced during the
development of software
* Cultural artifact
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_artifact>, a human-made
object which gives information about the culture of its creator
and users
* Document <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document> artifact, an
instantiation of a document.
* Social artifact <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_artifact>, a
product of individuals or groups (social beings) or of their
social behavior
* Virtual artifact <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_artifact>,
objects in the digital environment
* Project artifact
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Project_artifact&action=edit&redlink=1>,
documented outputs and work products specific to a project
implementation


- incorrect (in some way that relates to human processes as well)

* Artifact (error)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artifact_%28error%29>, an error or
misrepresentation introduced by a technique and/or technology
* Visual artefact <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_artefact>,
unintended graphics-related errors or noise caused by software or
hardware bugs.
* Artifact (observational)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artifact_%28observational%29>, any
perceived distortion or other data error caused by the instrument
of observation
* Compression artifact
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_artifact>, data
compression artifact in computer science, resulting from lossy
data compression
* Digital artifact <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_artifact>,
a visible defect in a digital photo or video picture
* Sonic artifact <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_artifact>, in
sound and music production, sonic material that is accidental or
unwanted, resulting from the editing of another soun

* Artifact (medical imaging)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artifact_%28medical_imaging%29>,
misrepresentations of tissue structures seen in medical images
*

If we further specify 'artifact object' or 'artifact material', and
clearly spell out in the definition that we mean 'human made', not
'error', I see no problem from that perspective.

I do agree that we need to be careful to get the logical definition
right, and spend more time on the process definition of what creates and
artifact material.

- Bjoern

[James Malone]

I am not suggesting we remove artifact object. I agree it serves a very
useful purpose. I was suggesting there may be subclasses of artifact
object which may also offer a further, useful degree of separation, just
as device does as a subclass therein. For example should organization
be a sibling of blood serum and cell pellet? Surely not, and this was
my point which I perhaps failed to articulate well, which is my bad.

James