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Instrumentality as part of a medical ontology, Diagrams in concept modeling

Abstract:

This paper examines instrumentality as part of a medical ontology. Our paper explicitly tries to combine a conceptual linguistic theory, i.e. cognitive linguistics, and the Unified Modeling Language (UML), the formal standard for conceptual modeling used in IT engineering. We have two linked theoretical objectives, (1) to provide a more refined and authentic usage-based typology of English subtypes of medical instrumentality, i.e. in medical abstracts and titles of research papers in scientific journals, and (2) to develop a correlated UML concept model for this instrumental typology. The instrumental subtypes are integrated in a general conceptual template for causality, where typically temporal shifts occur between a causing action (in which instrumentality occurs) and a caused action. This dynamic aspect questions the static diagrams used in concept modeling for terminography and calls for the use of other UML diagrams used in ISO WI 23156: activity and sequence diagrams to name a few.