Information content entities

All information items that are derived from material entities (i.e. statements that reference material qualities and are factual claims about an entity) fall under the domain of information content entity (ICE), very generally defined as a type of entity which bears information about something¹. Any ICE class may have is about object relations that connect it to other material entities or ICEs which define its aboutness. Examples: an “age since planting measurement datum is about some Spermatophyta” (among other things); a “minimal inhibitory concentration is about some dose response curve”, another ICE. Aboutness axioms should reinforce the content of term definitions.

The information content entity data item class holds singular entities or collections of entities that specifically record inputs or outputs of processes / equipment / human interaction. OBI distinguishes the following singular types of data items, usually called “datums”, as follows:

• A measurement datum class names and models the datum outputs of an assay, and their contextual semantics.
• A settings datum class which enables modeling an apparatus control input.
• A predicted data item class that applies to output of a prediction process.

All datums are allowed a small set of data properties directly or a value specifications, either approach allows pertinent string, categorical or numeric value about an entity to be expressed.

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¹The ability of an ICE to bear information depends on the coding scheme and copyable medium it inheres in, hence it is a generically dependent continuant.