Consider Schulzian conflation strategy

[cmungall]

This discussion is for the strategy outlined in this paper:

Scalable representations of diseases in biomedical ontologies Stefan Schulz, Kent Spackman, Andrew James, Cristian Cocos, and Martin Boeker

I am posting this here not to discuss representation of diseases per se, but to demonstrate a general strategy that could be applied in a targeted fashion to different parts of COB. Please keep this is mind when responding.

The general strategy is that in areas where we have disagreement about upper level philosophical classification (for example: is an organization a material entity) we can deliberately conflate, and formally define the conflated class as a union of philosophically committed classes.

So for example, if we decide that organization has a material aspect (consider organizations such as armies, orchestras, where the physical manifestation is important) or an immaterial aspect (organizations with zero members) or even dispositions, we could represent as

organization = organisation-ME OR organization-IE OR organization-D

(note: if implemented in COB these axioms and entities would not need to go in the main ontology)

Some slides that further explore the strategy:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1q5LjJ_cekDN6n029CYlyXrGlz6wE-H3brGx9U0F39sE/edit#slide=id.gde0f3b01d8_0_178