Table 1 Organising knowledge: the epistemic agents and representational means

I

Society

Demands

Problem (e.g. patient, disease)

Solution (e.g. diagnosis, prognosis, therapy)

standards and funding policies

Common knowledge

II

Individual

Scientists

Cognitive conceptualisation

Implicit representation in mind

Implicit semantics

Background knowledge of an individual scientist

III

Communities

(clinical, biomedical,

bioinformatical etc.)

Biomedical claims

expressed in the scientific language - publications

Explicit representation of domain knowledge

Implicit semantics

Background knowledge of

a scientific community

Terms as units of biomedical claims

Explicit representation of the terms - definition

Implicit semantics

Distributed domain knowledge

Various networks of

biomedical terms

IV

Community

(breast cancer)

Model for an ontology

Explicit representation of a unifying conceptual model

expressed in the scientific terms as a shared conceptualisation

Semi-explicit semantics

Sub-domain knowledge

problem related

(merging domains)

V

Computer scientists

Logics

Ontology

Explicit formal representation of shared conceptualisation

expressed in a formal language - formal ontology

Explicit semantics

Formalised knowledge

VI

Computer scientists

Engineering

Mapping ontology onto data records (metadata)

Merged ontology model and information model - applied ontology

Explicit representation and semantics

AI

Knowledge Base

(KB)

Data (Instances) structured within database architecture

Data models