Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

OtherSex insufficiently distinguished from UnknownSex #30

Open
cmungall opened this issue Jul 6, 2022 · 1 comment
Open

OtherSex insufficiently distinguished from UnknownSex #30

cmungall opened this issue Jul 6, 2022 · 1 comment

Comments

@cmungall
Copy link
Member

cmungall commented Jul 6, 2022

You have an axiom:

Sex = Female or Male (both of which are disjoint)

Leaving aside for now the accuracy of this model, let's accept this is your model. It is designed to expressly forbid sex being anything than one of the two. OWL is open world, so it still allows lack of commitment, but the underlying model must be one of the two.

Sex has two other subclasses:

  • OtherSex: skos:definition "It is not possible to accurately assess the applicability of male or female."@en
  • UnknownSex: skos:definition "Not assessed or not available."@en

Purely on the textual level, these seem insufficiently distinguished. That modal qualifier is doing a lot of work for you. This also seems a counterintuitive use of the term "other". This also implies other is a subclass of unknown.

I realize this is a difficult area but I think if you do adopt a strictly binary model then this should be more transparent, and use a different adjective than Other, if the system doesn't truly admit Other. You could still have a qualifier that involves identification. Maybe aligning with GSSO will help.

@ngo010
Copy link

ngo010 commented Nov 23, 2022

By aligning with GSSO, can we modify the Sex group as follows:

  • Gender
    • NoGender
    • NonBinaryGender
    • Sex
      • Female
      • Male
      • Intersex

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

3 participants