Bodenreider Olivier, Smith Barry, Burgun Anita
US National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland, USA.
Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science, Saarbrücken, Germany.
Form Ontol Inf Syst. 2004;2004:185-195.
Medical terminology collects and organizes the many different kinds of terms employed in the biomedical domain both by practitioners and also in the course of biomedical research. In addition to serving as labels for biomedical classes, these names reflect the organizational principles of biomedical vocabularies and ontologies. Some names represent invariant features (classes, universals) of biomedical reality (i.e., they are a matter for ontology). Other names, however, convey also how this reality is perceived, measured, and understood by health professionals (i.e., they belong to the domain of epistemology). We analyze terms from several biomedical vocabularies in order to throw light on the interactions between ontological and epistemological components of these terminologies. We identify four cases: 1) terms containing classification criteria, 2) terms reflecting detectability, modality, uncertainty, and vagueness, 3) terms created in order to obtain a complete partition of a given domain, and 4) terms reflecting mere fiat boundaries. We show that epistemology-loaded terms are pervasive in biomedical vocabularies, that the "classes" they name often do not comply with sound classification principles, and that they are therefore likely to cause problems in the evolution and alignment of terminologies and associated ontologies.
医学术语收集并整理了生物医学领域从业者在实践过程以及生物医学研究过程中所使用的多种不同类型的术语。除了作为生物医学类别的标签外，这些名称还反映了生物医学词汇表和本体的组织原则。一些名称代表生物医学现实的不变特征（类别、共性）（即它们属于本体论范畴）。然而，其他名称还传达了健康专业人员对这一现实的感知、测量和理解方式（即它们属于认识论范畴）。我们分析了几种生物医学词汇表中的术语，以便阐明这些术语的本体论和认识论成分之间的相互作用。我们识别出四种情况：1）包含分类标准的术语；2）反映可检测性、模态、不确定性和模糊性的术语；3）为实现给定领域的完整划分而创建的术语；4）反映纯粹人为划定界限的术语。我们表明，负载认识论的术语在生物医学词汇表中普遍存在，它们所命名的“类别”往往不符合合理的分类原则，因此很可能在术语及相关本体的演变和对齐过程中引发问题。
