BFO-Based Data and Information Ontologies
The Information Artifact Ontology (IAO)
The Information Artifact Ontology (IAO) grew out of the Data Processing Branch of the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) in recognition of the need for domain‐neutral resource for the representation of types of information content entities (ICEs), that would apply to documents and data of all kinds, and not merely to information entities in the domain of biomedicine. IAO is based on the copying and aboutnessrelations: an information content entity is, roughly, an entity that can be copied (in the way, for example, that a gene sequence or a computer file can be copied) and that is about something. The aboutness relation itself has its roots in the mental realm -- an information content entity e is about something, again roughly speaking, in virtue of the fact that the mental acts which gave rise to or which are used to interpret or communicate with e are about something.
Background Information
Videos
Articles
- Werner Ceusters & Barry Smith, "Aboutness: Towards Foundations for the Information Artifact Ontology", Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Biomedical Ontology (ICBO) (CEUR 1515), 2015.
- Barry Smith, Tatiana Malyuta, Ron Rudnicki, William Mandrick, David Salmen, Peter Morosoff, Danielle K. Duff, James Schoening & Kesny Parent, "IAO-Intel: An Ontology of Information Artifacts in the Intelligence Domain", Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Semantic Technologies for Intelligence, Defense, and Security (STIDS), (CEUR 1097), 2013, 33-40.
- Janna Hastings, Christopher Batchelor, Fabian Neuhaus, Christian Steinbeck, "What's in an 'is about' link? Chemical diagrams and the Information Artifact Ontology", Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Biomedical Ontology (ICBO) 2011.
- Mary Bone, Mark Blackburn, Benjamin Kruse, John Dzielski, Thomas Hagedorn and Ian Grosse, "Toward an Interoperability and Integration Framework to Enable Digital Thread", Systems, 2018, 6(4), 46; https://doi.org/10.3390/systems6040046.
Examples of ontologies extending IAO
IAO has been used as starting point for a large number of ontologies in the biomedical and bioinformatics domain. We list here some examples of direct or indirect reuse of IAO in non-biomedical fields.
- Ontology of Datatypes (OntoDT) (see also:here)
