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SNOMED CT’s Ontological Commitment

Stefan Schulz¹ and Ronald Cornet²

Correspondence: (Login to view email address)

1. IMBI, University Medical Center, Freiburg, Germany
2. Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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Document Type:

Manuscript

Date:

Received 25 July 2009 19:15 UTC; Posted 27 July 2009

Subjects:

Bioinformatics

Tags:

• SNOMED CT
• formal ontology
• ontology
• inference

Abstract:

SNOMED CT is a clinical terminology that describes the meaning of terms by logical axioms. This requires an ontological commitment, i.e. precise agreements about the ontological nature of the entities referred to. We provide evidence that SNOMED implicitly supports at least three different kinds of commitments, viz. (i) independently existing entities, (ii) representational artifacts, and (iii) clinical situations. Our analysis shows how the truth-value of a sentence changes according to one of these perspectives. We argue that a clear understanding of to what kind of entities SNOMED CT concepts extend is crucial for the proper use and maintenance of SNOMED CT.

Collection:

International Conference on Biomedical Ontology

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This document is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

How to cite this document:

Schulz, Stefan and Cornet, Ronald. SNOMED CT’s Ontological Commitment . Available from Nature Precedings <http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/npre.2009.3465.1> (2009)

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