[seek-kr-sms] OBOE discussion: current version

[Ferdinando Villa]

To express the points below (Measurement as event) more fully: the whole
contextualization business is the part of the Observation that relates to
the event of observing. In order to describe the Observable, we must observe
it, and in order to observe it, we must define a
space/time/method/treatment/etc context - be there, at that time, use that
method etc. The Observation as a "result of the event of observing" needs
contextual observations in order to characterize the event. So if we want to
see observation as an event, it is a whole new ontology we're talking about
- one of perdurants. Our datasets are endurants and require that OBOE is an
ontology of endurants, which crystallizes the RESULT of the observation
process. Our hasContext relationship translates the perdurant
space/time/method/etc context of the event Observation into endurant
Observations that can be recorded in a dataset.
 
I would also postulate that an annotation must contain one and only one
Observation that is not the target of a hasContext relationship. If more
than one appear during an annotation, we have more than one separate
datasets in the same physical storage.
 
 I totally agree and there has been some discussion about this.  I really
like your use of the word "event", I think this makes what we are actually
doing much clearer.  For example, we Observe a tree, each Measurement is an
event relating to that Observation, and a Measurement is of some
characteristic.  I second the move changing the property between Observation
and Meaurement to something like "hasMeasurementEvent". 

 
 
Our definition, if I remember correctly, was :Observation is a statement
that an Observable has been observed. I think more than this is going to
color OBOE with restrictions it does not need to have. By the way, we model
the result of the observation, not the process of the observation, and the
result is not an event. To annotate a dataset we don't need to know anything
about the measurement except its results. 
 

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