AI Magazine
Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems; Representation and Inference in the Cyc Project
Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems; Representation and Inference in the Cyc Project
From concepts to clinical reality: an essay on the benchmarking of biomedical terminologies
Journal of Biomedical Informatics - Special issue: Biomedical ontologies
Journal of Biomedical Informatics - Special issue: Biomedical ontologies
Strategies for referent tracking in electronic health records
Journal of Biomedical Informatics - Special issue: Biomedical ontologies
Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web
Referent tracking for Digital Rights Management
International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies
Applied Ontology: Focusing on content
Applied Ontology
Applying evolutionary terminology auditing to the Gene Ontology
Journal of Biomedical Informatics
Towards A Realism-Based Metric for Quality Assurance in Ontology Matching
Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference (FOIS 2006)
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In a series of papers over a period of several years Barry Smith and Werner Ceusters have offered a number of cogent criticisms of historical approaches to creating, maintaining, and applying biomedical terminologies and ontologies. And they have urged the adoption of what they refer to as a “realism-based” approach. Indeed, at times they insist that the realism-based approach not only offers clear advantages and a well-founded methodological basis for ontology development and evaluation, but that such a realist perspective is in fact necessary for understanding and using terminologies and ontologies in science. This paper explores a number of questions surrounding such claims, provides a careful characterization of the type of realism recommended by Smith and Ceusters, and evaluates the role that realism plays in the critiques and recommendations that they offer. The conclusion reached is that while Smith's and Ceusters' criticisms of prior practice in the treatment of ontologies and terminologies in medical informatics are often both perceptive and well founded, and while at least some of their own proposals demonstrate obvious merit and promise, none of this either follows from or requires the brand of realism that they propose. Editor's note: A response to this paper from Barry Smith and Werner Ceusters is scheduled to appear in a future issue of Applied Ontology.