Adapting fundamental concepts from insect societies to the demands of bio-ontologies

Abstract

The present work provides a logical account for translating caste concepts in social insects to an ontology-based data model, which can be used by researchers for describing and organizing entities belonging to non-human societies, as well as for the provision of evidential criteria for evaluating constitutive explanations of social entities. We establish the top-level category for the concept of caste and give examples on how to accommodate some subcategories (e.g. workers) in the ontology, following a domain granularity framework for the life sciences. We also provide accounts on current limitations in automated reasoning, current practices for caste conceptualization, and improvements needed to be addressed in future works.