Information Content Entity

Definition: An Information Content Entity (ICE) is an entity that is about something. ICEs are abstract (non-physical) entities that represent the information encoded in physical artifacts such as photographs, books, or digital storage medium (as opposed to the physical medium itself).

Supertypes: Entity > Generically Dependent Continuant

Subtypes: Assertion, Assertion Method, Evidence Line, Evidence Item, Data Item, Study Finding, Journal Article, Book, Protocol, Figure, Data Set, . . .

Description: ICEs [1] are abstract entities that convey information about things in the world. A particular ICE can be encoded simultaneously in many physical or digital mediums and formats. For example, only one instance of the first edition of "War and Peace" exists as an ICE, representing information conveyed in this work. But many instances of "War and Peace" exist at the level of their physical concretizations in printed books or digital devices.

Examples:

• Data Items: A '548.5 mg/dl' measurement of blood glucose in mutant mice.
• Protocols: A blood glucose assay protocol that describes how the measurement was taken.
• Calculations: A 1.3951e-24 p-value statistic indicating a significant increase relative to wild-type mice.
• Assertions: An assertion stating that "Lpr1 leptin receptor mutations can lead to diabetes".
• Publications: A journal article that publishes this assertion.
• Figure/Tables: A figure or table from this article that present data supporting it.
• Software/Algorithms: A text-mining algorithm that mines the literature to identify and extract the assertion.
• Databases: The MGI (Mouse Genome Informatics) database that stores the assertion as a structured gene-disease annotation.

Scope and Usage

Most of the core SEPIO concepts are subtypes of Information Content Entity, including Assertions, Evidence Lines, Evidence Items. It is therefore important to understand how ICE instances are identified and distinguished in the creation SEPIO-compliant data. More detailed discussion of specific ICE subtypes, including their identify criteria and function in SEPIO models, can be found on other Concept Pages.

Attributes

Listed below are attributes that apply generally to any type of ICE. These are inherited by all ICE subtypes defined in SEPIO, including the core concepts of an Assertion, Evidence Line, and Evidence Item.

Property	Value Type	Cardinality	Description
description	xsd:string	0..m	A free-text description of an entity.
date	xsd:dateTime	1..1	A date associated with an event in the life-cycle of an entity (from Dublin Core). SEPIO defines sub-properties for specific evnets, e.g. creation date, modification date.
is_about	Entity	1..m	An entity that the ICE is about (describes, denotes, mentions, specifies, etc).
has_contributor	Agent	1..m	An Agent that contributes to the creation, modification, or evaluation of an entity. SEPIO defines sub-properties for these and other specific forms of contribution.
is_output_of	Activity	1..1	An activity that generated an entity.
is_specified_by	Directive Information Entity	0..m	A method (e.g. protocol, recipe, guideline) that specifies how an ICE such as an Assertion or Data Item is generated.
source	Information Content Entity	0..m	An information resource from which an entity is derived, in whole or in part (from Dublin Core).
qualified_contribution	Contribution	0..m	This property reifies the has_contributor relation to allow recording of additional context (e.g. a role played by the Agent making the contribution). It is analogous to a qualifiedAttribution in PROV-O.

References

1. http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/ppt/IAO/IAO-and-BFO-Oct-2013.pptx - a slide deck on ICEs in the Basic Formal Oontology (BFO) and Information Artifact Ontology (IAO).

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_{Jump to: Assertion | Evidence Item | Evidence Line | Agent | Activity | Contribution | Statement | Proposition}