routes as processes and medium as material entities

[diatomsRcool]

I notice while browsing ExO in ontobee that route is a direct children of Thing. Can we make routes a direct child of BFO process? and exposure medium a child of BFO material entity?

It would help my use case.

[cjgrondin]

uncertainty about making routes and events subclass of BFO process; not sure we need to do that; need to think about this

[ddooley]

It would be great if ExO is BFO compatible to type its top level classes under at least 1 BFO class. That way on integration of ExO with other ontologies for an application etc. everything organizes nicely rather than floating to top level.

[cjgrondin]

Making top level classes of ExO compatible with BFO sounds reasonable to me. Currently, there are four top level classes of ExO: exposure stressor, exposure_receptor, exposure event and exposure outcome.
exposure event is_a BFO process
Would it work to make each term of exposure stressor and exposure_receptor a BFO entity?
What about exposure outcome?

[diatomsRcool]

The stressor can be anything, so that may need to be named entity. The receptor is going to be an organism, organism part, or group of organisms and so would be material entity. The outcome can be a disease or phenotype - that would be a continuant. Open to other suggestions.

[cjgrondin]

Could exposure outcome be an occurrent "an entity that unfolds itself in time or it is the instantaneous boundary of such an entity" instead of a continuant "an entity that persists, endures, or continues to exist through time while maintaining its identity"?

[diatomsRcool]

The exposure event itself is definitely an occurrent. When I check to see how diseases and phenotypes are grounded in BFO, they are listed as continuants. Are there any other types of outcomes we want?

[cjgrondin]

When developing ExO, the working group included several outcomes to an exposure event: biological response (disease, phenotype, etc), public policy, and intervention (described in PMID: 22324457).
Also, yes, exposure event is_a BFO: process, which is a child term of occurrent

[diatomsRcool]

interesting....
I wouldn't have thought about public policy and intervention as exposure outcomes. It is true and important, but I would model it differently.
Do you have an example of how people are using ExO to model a public policy or intervention as an exposure outcome?

[ddooley]

It seems like there's opportunity (unless someone has done it) to develop some language around policy design (as a process, bearing on behavioural change) in response to evidence generated from exposure studies. But that seems like a longer chain of modelling! P.s. OBI/ECO was just workshopping a revision to clarify experimental evidence".