Modeling Rights in OWL

ethics ontology philosophy

Wesley Hohfeld’s (1879–1918) discovery of an interrelated set of ‘incidents’ has had a profound effect on law and the analysis of rights, and is widely accepted (albeit with dispute around the edges). The Hohfeldian Analytical System is a formal system that can be used to analyze and relate different kinds of rights, their content, their agents, and actions to one another. The ‘incidents’ include:

  • powers
  • privileges
  • claims
  • immunities
Wesley Hohfeld (1879–1918)

Recently, I have been working with Mathias Brochhausen to implement them in an ontology in OWL that can be leveraged for knowledge representation of rights and obligations in domains like law, insurance claims, medicine…

Describing the incidents and relating them is easy for most of the rules in the system. For instance, relations like ‘Every power is a secondary rule and an active right’ are easy to treat with rdfs:subClassOf relations.

Other axioms are more difficult. Take for instance:

  • A has a claim that B φ if and only if B has a duty to A to φ.

There are any number of ways one might begin formulating this rule in a logical system. In OWL, however, one is limited by a) the (arguable) use of a three place predicate (i.e. X has claim/duty on Y to perform action Z) and b) a prohibition against repeating the appearance of a variable in a class axiom (for the same reason, one cannot axiomatize the class of all barbers who shave themselves). This leaves the task of enforcing some of these axioms outside of OWL in languages like SWRL, SHACL, and SPIN.

A developing draft of this work is now available on GitHub: https://github.com/neilotte/moralpsych

    The Informed Consent Ontology (ICO)

    Conferences ethics ontology philosophy science

    There are many representations of informed consent in EHR systems. Such representations aid in clarifying which protocols are relevant to a research study, and what may be done with a particular biological sample taken from a patient. In this way, they aid in ensuring research can move forward while protecting patient rights.

    I am presently aiding in a revision of the OBO Foundry Informed Consent Ontology (ICO), whose goal is to unite a series of ontological representations in order to track consent across the life cycle, from the moment consent is provided, through the transfer of that consent power to various other institutions, where it may be used to permit a particular research study.

    The original version of the file developed by Oliver He and colleagues is available here and a development fork of its github repo containing this ontology is presently under development here. The development team and I are grateful to Oliver and his colleagues at the University of Michigan for the opportunity to work with them, and we look forward to presenting at ICBO2018. Comments and criticisms welcome. See our poster here.

     

    Buffalo Annual X-Phi Conference 2016

    Conferences philosophy science

    IMG_0391

    This last weekend Buffalo hosted its annual x-Phi Conference. Helen De Cruz served as keynote, delivering a great talk on cognitive science/xPhi in philosophy of religion. Major take-aways: 1) phil of religion, more than other fields of philosophy, presently seems like an empty performance of group identity, where philosophers go to argue positions they, but not others, find forceful, 2) phil of religion, as many people understand it, is a fairly dull affair that could be more interesting, 3) phil of religion is a rich place for philosophers generally to find inspiration, and 4) phil of religion is dominated by Christian theists and their detractors (and is even more white and male than philosophy generally).

    One of the interesting things I noticed at this conference vs. previous conferences is the incorporation in a number of talks of qualitative methods (e.g. semi-structured interviews) in presentations, in addition to survey methodologies. This led to some interesting conversations about these methods may (or may not) be helpful.

     

     

    Post-“Postmodernism”

    philosophy

    I was thinking today how much of the language intellectuals use to describe our place in history has changed, and in particular, how I don’t hear the word “postmodern” thrown around as casually as I used to a decade ago. Curious whether or not I could find evidence for this change, I went to Ngram–as I am apt–and ran some searches et voila! Theory confirmed. Looks like 1998 was the ebb. What happened? Did reviews of Radiohead’s Ok Computer and the Matrix movies overuse the term, and 9-11 sweep away our Baudrillardian/Foucauldian concerns with representations and power by making our fears seem suddenly too immediate?