A brief description of the current state of the top-level of ON8.5 is provided.
We apply here the minimal ontological commitment which distinguishes between sorts (such as Body Part or Surgical Procedure) and relations (such as Dynamic, Part Of or Embodies), where a relation is a second-order predicate describing first-order predicates.
Sorts map to the usual sorts in an order-sorted logic, while we map relations to n-ary predicates. Additional ("non-basic", see par. 2.2) sorts derive from the necessary and sufficient application of relations to sorts: these last are called sortal specifications (see par. 4. for a detailed account of ON8.5 ontological commitment).
Our top-level has been defined as the multi-local integration of a corpus of medical sources (par. 2.4.2), by triggering general and domain theories. Also, we tried to design it with the eventual scope of accounting for actual medical assertions in medical records, reports, etc., which describe states of affairs, such as:
<<the situation of a patient suffering from a viral hepatitis at a certain space and time and observed by some physician within a healthcare structure>>.
Thus, let us consider the canonical semantics of a medical state of affairs in the definition of a frame including the categories that can be instantiated in it. Such a frame is represented by a tuple:
In the present work, s, p, c, and d are variables inside sorts, ie the possible concepts for entities in a medical state of affairs as well as the possible structural concepts in a semantic or lexical field; while r varies within the set of the possible structuring concepts -- say, operators -- within a semantic or lexical field.
Tab.1 below shows some subordinates for the main sorts and relations for our ontological frame of a medical state of affairs.
Applying the frame to the example we quoted at the beginning of this paragraph, we can recognize the following sortals: Situation, Patient, Liver, Inflammation, Virus, Physician, HealthcareStructure, Diagnosis, Symbol -- where Inflammation is a sub-sort of PathologicFunction (par. 2.5) -- and the following relations:
