In the case of diseases, decades of research years have been carried out in order to establish pragmatic and popular taxonomies. In other domains, new ontologies would need to be developed. Note that we consider ontologies to be a superset of taxonomies.
While ontologies have been developed for diseases, that doesn’t mean that the ontologies are good. The DSM-V for example was crappy enough that the head of the NIH called for people to develop alternative ways of measuring it after it was published.
Apart from the actual definition, if you have a question like whether the amount of people with Asperger’s did increase, you only have data about the number of people who are diagnosed with Asbergers and not about how many people would qualify for the diagnosis.
The easiest way to improve cancer survival rates is to diagnose more people with cancer and that’s the strategy which the US used to get the best cancer survival rates in the world. Only quite recently under the Obama administration, the US government came to the point that it makes sense to reduce the number of people who get diagnosed with cancer.
I didn’t mean that all analogies around diseases were good, especially around psychology. The challenges are quite hard; even in cases where a lot of good work goes into making ontologies, there could be tons of edge cases in similar.
That said, I think medicine is one of the best examples of the importance and occasional effectiveness of large ontologies. If one is doing independent work in the field, I would imagine it is rare that they would be best served by doing their own ontology development, given how much is been done so far.
The DSM-V is an ontology that’s cause neutral. That’s useful when you have many professionals who need a common language but which disagree about the causes of mental illnesses.
A depression that’s due to a head trauma is different from a depression because someone doesn’t deal well with a romantic relationship that’s ended.
When you want to actually treat depression it’s on the other hand very useful to be able to keep different types of depressions apart.
″ That’s useful when you have many professionals who need a common language but which disagree about the causes of mental illnesses. ”
Using the proposed framework, it means that the field lacks Foundational Understanding. Thus I wouldn’t feel comfortable calling the DSM an ontology, though there is i.e. the Mental Disease Ontology, which sometimes maps to DSM.
I do approve of the Mental Disease Ontology as a project of fellow bioinformaticians to replace the mess of the psychiatrists but to me the Mental Disease Ontology doesn’t look like it’s a solution.
When it comes to cancerophobia and AIDS phobia both of those terms seem to me like they point to symptoms and there might be different underlying mechanisms in different patients.
It’s also not clear to me why impulse control disorders are supposed to be no cognitive disorders.
Just a quick 2 cents: I think it’s possible to have really poor or not-useful ontologies. One could easily make a decent ontology of Greek Gods, for instance. However, if their Foundational Understanding wasn’t great, then that ontology won’t be that useful (as if they believed in Greek Gods).
In this case, I would classify the DSM as mainly a taxonomy (a kind of ontology), but I think many people would agree it could be improved. Much of this improvement would hopefully come through what is here called Foundational Understanding.
While ontologies have been developed for diseases, that doesn’t mean that the ontologies are good. The DSM-V for example was crappy enough that the head of the NIH called for people to develop alternative ways of measuring it after it was published.
Apart from the actual definition, if you have a question like whether the amount of people with Asperger’s did increase, you only have data about the number of people who are diagnosed with Asbergers and not about how many people would qualify for the diagnosis.
The easiest way to improve cancer survival rates is to diagnose more people with cancer and that’s the strategy which the US used to get the best cancer survival rates in the world. Only quite recently under the Obama administration, the US government came to the point that it makes sense to reduce the number of people who get diagnosed with cancer.
I didn’t mean that all analogies around diseases were good, especially around psychology. The challenges are quite hard; even in cases where a lot of good work goes into making ontologies, there could be tons of edge cases in similar.
That said, I think medicine is one of the best examples of the importance and occasional effectiveness of large ontologies. If one is doing independent work in the field, I would imagine it is rare that they would be best served by doing their own ontology development, given how much is been done so far.
The DSM-V is an ontology that’s cause neutral. That’s useful when you have many professionals who need a common language but which disagree about the causes of mental illnesses.
A depression that’s due to a head trauma is different from a depression because someone doesn’t deal well with a romantic relationship that’s ended.
When you want to actually treat depression it’s on the other hand very useful to be able to keep different types of depressions apart.
″ That’s useful when you have many professionals who need a common language but which disagree about the causes of mental illnesses. ”
Using the proposed framework, it means that the field lacks Foundational Understanding. Thus I wouldn’t feel comfortable calling the DSM an ontology, though there is i.e. the Mental Disease Ontology, which sometimes maps to DSM.
I do approve of the Mental Disease Ontology as a project of fellow bioinformaticians to replace the mess of the psychiatrists but to me the Mental Disease Ontology doesn’t look like it’s a solution.
When it comes to cancerophobia and AIDS phobia both of those terms seem to me like they point to symptoms and there might be different underlying mechanisms in different patients.
It’s also not clear to me why impulse control disorders are supposed to be no cognitive disorders.
Just a quick 2 cents: I think it’s possible to have really poor or not-useful ontologies. One could easily make a decent ontology of Greek Gods, for instance. However, if their Foundational Understanding wasn’t great, then that ontology won’t be that useful (as if they believed in Greek Gods).
In this case, I would classify the DSM as mainly a taxonomy (a kind of ontology), but I think many people would agree it could be improved. Much of this improvement would hopefully come through what is here called Foundational Understanding.