NTR: History

[pbuttigieg]

Hi all,

As noted in our OBO Ops call today - it may be good to add something like "history" in COB.

ENVO would definitely use this for, e.g., the biogeographic / life histories of ecoregions and similar entities. Those matter for many conservation valuation schemes, and also for geological histories.

SDGIO would also be interested in that for cultural histories and the like.

Thoughts?

[bpeters42]

I would welcome that. We routinely want to refer to 'clinical histories', like the diseases a person has had in the past.

There is a history term in BFO: http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/BFO_0000182 I hate much of the definition, as the part about processes being part of the 'spatiotemporally region an entity occupies' means it is unclear to me if e.g. as part of my personal history, I studied at the University of Hamburg. I thought history would simply be the totality of processes in which an entity participates. I might well overlook some complexities.

On Tue, Apr 20, 2021 at 9:21 AM Pier Luigi Buttigieg < @.***> wrote:

Hi all,

As noted in our OBO Ops call today - it may be good to add something like "history" in COB.

ENVO would definitely use this for, e.g., the biogeographic / life histories of ecoregions and similar entities. Those matter for many conservation valuation schemes, and also for geological histories.

SDGIO would also be interested in that for cultural histories and the like.

Thoughts?

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[cmungall]

For reference, this is the sum total of classes that currently subclass the BFO concept:

term	label
obo:icdo.owl#ICDO_0000515	allergy status to other drugs, medicaments and biological substances status
obo:icdo.owl#ICDO_0000516	allergy status to narcotic agent status
obo:icdo.owl#ICDO_0000517	allergy status to penicillin
obo:icdo.owl#ICDO_0000518	dependence on renal dialysis
obo:icdo.owl#ICDO_0000519	dependence on respirator
obo:icdo.owl#ICDO_0000520	dependence on respirator [ventilator] status
obo:icdo.owl#ICDO_0000521	dependence on wheelchair
obo:icdo.owl#ICDO_0000522	kidney transplant status
obo:icdo.owl#ICDO_0000523	personal history of diseases of the circulatory system
obo:icdo.owl#ICDO_0000524	personal history of immunosupression therapy
obo:icdo.owl#ICDO_0000525	personal history of long-term (current) use of anticoagulants
obo:icdo.owl#ICDO_0000526	personal history of malignant neoplasm of breast
obo:icdo.owl#ICDO_0000527	personal history of malignant neoplasm of digestive organs
obo:icdo.owl#ICDO_0000528	personal history of medical treatment
obo:icdo.owl#ICDO_0000529	personal history of nicotine dependence
obo:icdo.owl#ICDO_0000548	personal history of major surgery, not elsewhere classified
obo:ECOCORE_00000018	life history
obo:RBO_010001	radiation attenuation
obo:SEPIO_0000058	provenance

It seems historically there has not been a great need for this upper level term, and I question some of the existing usages

Inclusion of this term has to be balanced against confusion and inconsistency that will be introduced by opening up another way to make shadow classes. I believe all use cases can be served more clearly by using existing concepts like process, material entity, disease, ecoregion, etc, as well as some simple relations to connect them.

If we do introduce this then the relation composition chains and inference need to be well fleshed out and there needs to be clear design pattern guidelines. Do we have named classes and instances for histories of organisms, as well as their parts? Are those histories also subdivided into parts? etc

[wdduncan]

At a high level, it seems to me that by 'history' often we mean that an entity participated in a process at some point in the past. For example, if I have a history of broken bones, it means that at some point I participated in process that broke one or more of my bones.

Some notions of 'history' don't seem to fit into this paradigm. For instance, I have a family history of cancer. But, this does not mean that I have participated in some cancer process.

So, are we just needing to capture the past tense of 'participates in' with history?