PopulationAndCommunityOntology
population qualities
You include these under BFO_0000019 (quality).
Note that "population growth rate" might be a process profile in BFO2, which is
disjoint with quality.
There is also the argument that "carrying capacity" is a disposition, not a
quality. Also, it's defined as a number in PCO, and numbers exist outside BFO.
If the use case here is to represent an actual number, I would use an OWL
datatype property.
Original issue reported on code.google.com by [email protected] on 14 Mar 2013 at 5:56
Are rates in general considered process profiles? How is the growth rate of an
individual organism treated? This is something I need help with. It's not
always to easy to fit things into BFO world.
Having carrying capacity as a datatype property makes sense to me for some
uses, as when you want to annotate a population with the number that is its
carrying capacity. Does this still make sense if you want to describe an
ecological model where carrying capacity is a parameter that can vary?
Original comment by [email protected] on 21 Mar 2013 at 10:35
- Changed state: Accepted
Chris, is there a reference or anything I can look at about when something
should be a class versus a data property? I think this is going to be an issue
with a lot of terms.
Original comment by [email protected] on 21 Mar 2013 at 10:40
rates: growth itself would be a biological process (and is in GO). Rate of
growth would be a process profile in BFO2 I believe.
The datatype property issue is tricky. I wouldn't stop doing things the way
you're doing them. It's good to come up with specific use cases and test them.
The ecological modeling one is a good one (though it brings up other
interesting issues - I don't think models can have qualities in BFO2, so you
might have an IAO parameter that is_about carrying capacity).
Original comment by [email protected] on 21 Mar 2013 at 11:35
Keep in mind that growth is constrained to an organism or cell. The basic ecological population model that has reproduction as a part as well as immigration, emigration, death (by predation, disease, old age, etc) can be helpful here. Population and/or community growth occurs when reproduction and immigration ("entrance" processes) exceeds "exit" from the population, community, or region (interesting spatiotemporal issue there). We'll have to create and define these 'raw material' classes to think about which process we want to link a "rate" quality to.
