Aboutness: Towards Foundations for the Information Artifact Ontology (2015)¶
Local reference identifier:
xwkont:ref:ceusters-smith-2015Slug:ceusters-smith-2015Editorial status:candidateCreated:2026-07-01Modified:2026-07-01
Descriptive Metadata¶
| Field | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Title | Aboutness: Towards Foundations for the Information Artifact Ontology | |
| Creator | Barry Smith, Werner Ceusters | Confirmed via direct primary-source read (CEUR-WS PDF), 2026-07-01. |
| Contributor | unknown | |
| Publisher | CEUR Workshop Proceedings (Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Biomedical Ontology, ICBO 2015) | |
| Source type | conference paper | CEUR-WS Vol-1515, regular10. |
| Version or edition | ICBO 2015 | |
| Identifier or URL | https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1515/regular10.pdf | Mirrors also at PhilArchive, PhilPapers, ResearchGate, Semantic Scholar. |
| Access date | 2026-07-01 | |
| Snapshot / Stable identifier | http://web.archive.org/web/20250615152714/https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1515/regular10.pdf (2025-06-15) | Verified retrievable via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at time of writing, per ADR-0012. CEUR-WS URLs are also themselves intended as permanent, but a timestamped snapshot is recorded regardless per ADR-0012's uniform rule. |
| Rights/license | unknown | Not verified in this pass. |
Source Relation Notes¶
This is the primary paper behind the Information Artifact Ontology (IAO)'s core Information Content Entity (ICE) definition and the aboutness relation, both cited in docs/crosswalks/concepts/information-artifact.md. IAO is a separate, actively maintained OBO Foundry ontology built on BFO (not part of BFO-2020's own core release, per xwkont:ref:bfo-2020) — this paper is IAO's own foundational/theoretical justification, not the OWL file itself. The paper also proposes (but does not finalize as an implemented revision) a broadened definition of ICE requiring aboutness to a "portion of reality" rather than just an "entity," to handle universals, relations, other ICEs, and configurations as targets of aboutness.
Rights and License Notes¶
Not verified in this pass. Treat as unknown rather than guessed.
Citation and Locator Notes¶
Recommended citation: Smith, B., & Ceusters, W. (2015). Aboutness: Towards Foundations for the Information Artifact Ontology. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Biomedical Ontology (ICBO 2015). CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol-1515.
Directly verified 2026-07-01 by fetching the CEUR-WS PDF and extracting text manually (Python zlib stream decompression + PDF content-stream Tj/TJ operator parsing, since no PDF-text-extraction tool was available in this environment and WebFetch could not parse the compressed PDF streams directly — same technique used for the DOLCE 2022, UFO 2021, and Masolo et al. 2004 papers elsewhere in this repository).
Key finding used in docs/crosswalks/concepts/information-artifact.md: the paper states IAO's current (as of 2015) formal definition of ICE verbatim: "INFORMATION CONTENT ENTITY =def. an ENTITY which is (1) GENERICALLY DEPENDENT on (2) some MATERIAL ENTITY and which (3) stands in a relation of ABOUTNESS to some ENTITY." It further clarifies: "While every ICE is dependent upon some material entity that is its bearer, ICEs themselves are not material entities" — confirming the crosswalk's paraphrase closely. The aboutness relation is grounded in cognitive acts: "acts of thinking, speaking, hearing, writing and reading... through which ICEs are created, understood, and communicated," consistent with the crosswalk's "aboutness relation has roots in the mental realm" characterization.
Reused for information-artifact.md's new GUM Name correspondence (2026-07-07): the already-extracted ICE definition above was reused (not re-fetched) as the comparison point for GUM's Name class ("An accepted but possibly arbitrary label for some entity"), added as mapping-009 at low-medium confidence — a structural, not source-drawn, comparison.