Scope

1. Overview

CRO’s scope may informally be understood as being anything that may be cognitively apprehended. Its job is therefore to a) describe the totality of things that an agent may know about, and which may therefore be represented in information and b) to aid information systems development, which implies addressing things like models and formal languages. To do both, it accounts for:

  • information - meaning-carrying content as a first order entity;

  • models on which information about mental, social or physical entities may be based;

  • languages, both formal and semi-formal, in which models may be expressed;

  • formal systems, including mathematics and logics;

  • kinds of things recognised in the real world, which are real world descriptions (distinct from the objects in their extension) as first order entities, particularly kinds of artifacts (devices etc) and (bio)chemical compounds (drugs, etc);

  • cohort descriptions that identify the common characteristics of a group, as first order entities;

  • agents, i.e. purposeful or goal-directed autonomous entities, who are the creators and ultimate consumers of information, as well as of mental constructs in general;

  • social relationships among agents, including contracts, delegations and accountabilities in general;

  • material entities, including objects, disease processes, heart attacks, mental phenomena (qualia, auditory hallucinations, etc);

  • qualities and their possible values, including presence (car air conditioning), categorial (eye colour) and continuous (gas pipeline pressure);

  • fiction, counter-factuals and simulations, which are all instances of possible worlds whose ontology is the same as that of actual reality or very close.

Many of these categories have been dealt with extensively in existing research, including from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) community (BFO cite:[BFO_Arp_Smith_Spear], IAO cite:[Ceusters2015-CEUATF], Relations Ontology and many others); the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano group (UFO cite:[UFO_Guizzardi_et_al_2022]); and YAMATO cite:[Mizoguchi2021YAMATOYM]. However each of these groups (and others) has produced its own solutions, with no generally accepted master ontology, and particularly none oriented to the development of information systems, although UFO and YAMATO do take information systems development into consideration.

What follows is an analysis of reality from a cognitive point of view rather than a material one. It treats all entities in terms of their existence in social reality, rather than their material constitution, as BFO and similar ontologies do. The reason to do so is pragmatic: information systems are built to aid human enterprises, which are undertaken by groups and organisations of various kinds that consist of goal-directed agents - historically humans, but starting to include AI agents. Consequently, the organising principle of CRO is the content, definition and provenance of information.

We do not disavow the realist point of view, we only consider the material basis of business entities (such as persons or devices) as being of interest in the specific domains such as medicine, bioscience, chemistry, and so on, where meaning is bound to material reality.

The resulting ontology is a synthesis in which elements of BFO, RO and others are re-used.