Don’t forget that identifiers for individuals are grounded in institutional frames of reference with context and scope. Your name is not yours. Rather it typically was assigned to you by a combination of your parents and whatever jurisdiction you were born in that issued your birth certificate. Note that SSN is also nation and jurisdiction-specific, and interestingly, is not guaranteed to be unique to you. Your driver’s license number is specific to the state issuing the license. The combination of nation, state, and driver’s license number represents your identity in a motor vehicle operating context (assuming the nation you are operating in recognizes your issuing nation/state license), and possibly in a voting context as well – but not in an IRS context or Social Security context.  Passport numbers are specific to people in an international travel context, and issued by the State Department or similar institution in other national contexts. There are many other identities for individuals (not just people) in differing contexts and scope. For example, part numbers, serial numbers, model numbers, UPC codes, VINs, RFID, asset number, title number, policy number, customer number, etc.

The important thing to recognize is that the same individual may have a different individual identifier in different ontologies, and that if you want interoperability across domains and contexts, you need to have a way of mapping individuals from one identifier frame of reference to another, whether we are talking about people, countries, elements, planets, products, retailers, airline flights, airport gates, airplanes, satellites, etc. And we need to recognize that there are few, if any, “inherent” or “context-free” individual identities, DNA notwithstanding. Put differently, the identify of an individual in a given ontology should be assumed to be specific to that ontology, and any institutional/domain frames of reference and scope specified for that ontology. A “best practice” would be to be explicit about such institutional frames of reference and scope if and when individuals are identified in some ontology.

Hans

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Richard Dapoigny <richard.dapoigny@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 2:18 PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Ontologies and individuals
To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Le 11/12/2012 18:57, William Frank a écrit :
I believed that the point was that,
a domain ontology would, for most domains, especially scientific ones, need to include references to special individuals,
Yes, but what is important is to unambiguously identify individuals from classes. For that purpose the identity criteria introduced in OntoClean is of utmost importance. For example:
like zero, -> criteria of identity: its symbol

like the chemical elements, -> criteria of identity: its chemical symbol in the Mendeleev table

as individuals, like the earth, -> criteria of identity: its name

This approach works well for people called 'Smith'.

BS

It was only some examples (of course not complete). For people I do not suggest the name but rather e.g., a Social Security Number (SSN).
Richard

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