Ceusters Werner
New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics & Life Sciences, Buffalo, NY, USA.
Stud Health Technol Inform. 2012;180:68-72.
Biomedical data collections are typically compiled on the basis of assessment instruments and associated terminologies and their data structure explained by means of data dictionaries. The Information Artifact Ontology (IAO) is an attempt to give a realism-based account of the essence of information entities and how components of such entities relate to each other and to that what they are information about. Changes in the taxonomy and the definitions of the IAO, most importantly the addition of the terms 'representational artifact' and 'representational unit', are proposed to make the IAO a useful tool to clarify formally the distinctions and commonalities between data collections and associated artifacts that are compiled independently from each other, yet cover the same domain.
生物医学数据集合通常是根据评估工具、相关术语及其通过数据字典解释的数据结构来编制的。信息工件本体论（IAO）试图基于现实主义对信息实体的本质以及这些实体的组成部分如何相互关联以及与它们所表示的内容之间的关系给出一种解释。有人提议对IAO的分类法和定义进行修改，最重要的是增加“表示工件”和“表示单元”这两个术语，以使IAO成为一个有用的工具，用于正式阐明相互独立编制但涵盖相同领域的数据集合与相关工件之间的区别和共性。
