Adrien BARTON, researcher at the Institut de recherche en informatique in Toulouse  will come at Loria for a philosophy-informatics seminar on Sept. 19th at 2pm in LORIA in room A008.

This seminar is part of the LUE project Open Language and Knowledge for Citizens and is initiated by our colleagues from the Archives Henri-Poincaré Lab.

Ontology applied to data sharing

Applied ontology is a field at the crossroads of various disciplines, including computer science and philosophy. It aims to systematically develop general categorizations that promote semantic interoperability of data (that is, ensuring the preservation of the meaning of data when it is transmitted from one system to another). An applied ontology defines the categories of entities relevant to a field of knowledge, and sets out formal axioms that clarify the relationships between these entities.

An ontology can be represented as a computer file – the OWL (Web Ontology Language) format being frequently used today. The field of biomedical ontologies is particularly active, with the continued development of a large set of interoperable biomedical ontologies, the OBO Foundry (http://www.obofoundry.org/). But ontologies are also widely used in many other fields (engineering, internet of things, geographic information systems, environment, ecology, etc.).

I will show how philosophical work on causality or the nature of informational entities can support the development of coherent ontologies, considering various examples from biomedical ontology. I will briefly present the Quebec PARS3 project for a learning health system, based on these ontologies, which aims to support a coupling between care and research activities.