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Information content entities, qualities of bearers, and measurement units, information structure #596
Description
Definition of information content entity:
Information Content Entity is here intended to be a class of Entities whose instances are the informational content of Information Bearing Entities. For example, three instances of information bearers -- such as a bar chart, color-coded map, and a written report -- each of which lists the GDP of Countries for the year 2010 are each different carriers of the same information content. It is this content that is generically dependent upon its carrier. This treatment of Informational Content Entity (cf. the Information Artifact Ontology) leads to a principle of subtyping based upon the relationship that ICE's have with the Entity they are about rather than characteristics such as format, language, measurement scale, or media. The latter are treated here as being Qualities of bearers.
[my emphasis]
The comment about measurement scale not being a concern of ICEs seems to conflict with the fact that measurement unit is a subclass of ICE.
Language is defined as
A Directive Information Content Entity that prescribes a canonical format for communication.
So a format, subclass of ICE, explicitly excluded by the emphasized text.
I have a couple of thoughts about this but would appreciate comments or clarification.
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The whole comment should just be deleted. Depending on how one defines allowable concretizations of an ICE these might or might not be aspects of the ICE. We don't currently have a relation between ICEs that share concretizations, but might have one e.g. One ICE might allow the content to be expressed in any language, and a second only in English. The relation is that the concretizations of the latter are subset of the concretizations of the former.
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Measurement unit, language, format belong under (the as yet undefined) information structure. For instance the two classes in the first content might differ in that the former is structured with a language but not any particular language, but the latter structured only by English.
I lean towards implementing (2), adding the relation mentioned in (1), then changing the comment to reflect that those characteristics are of structure, not qualities.
A tentative definition of information structure:
a generically dependent continuant that is not, by itself, about something but which instead wholly or partially organizes the parts of some information content entity, contributing to its interpretability.
Examples: Matrix structure, rasterized structure, video structure, list structure, textural structure, SVG format, spreadsheet structure, the English language, glyph
This paper mentions information structure entity, however, the idea isn't developed very far.
Information Structure Entity (ISE). An ISE is a structural part of an ICE; speaking metaphorically, it is an ICE with the content removed: for example an empty cell in a spreadsheet; a blank Microsoft Word file. ISEs thus capture part of what is involved when we talk about the ‘format’ of an IA
More to say about this, but let's hear first impressions.
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giacomodecolle commentedon Mar 10, 2025
I have been thinking about ISEs for a while. I don't want to take a stance on language but Excel spreadsheets, JSON structures, etc. look like ISEs to me. I think in most of these cases we have a directive ICE (the Excel format) and an associated ISE (this specific empty file). Would ISEs be able to be concretized and share other features with ICEs? Are cells and rows in a spreadsheet parts of the ISE?
alanruttenberg commentedon Mar 12, 2025
I think ISEs are GDCs and so concretized. I don't know that they are always concretized as empty structures. Rather the structure and the ICE are concretized together. E.g. in your spreadsheet example, the pattern of dotted lines that surround a cell is part of a concretization of an ISE, I think.
Beware of spreadsheets. Those empty cells you see don't necessarily have an existence other than as images. Spreadsheets frequently use sparse data structures. So notice how you can scroll down a and to the right of any content and see blank cells? What you see there might not manifest as individuals in a data structure until something needs to be associated with one of them cells. In that case, when they are off the screen they don't have a concretization and so don't exist. It's more complicated than I currently have an idea of how to handle. It''s a general problem when we consider GDCs that have both analog(typically visual) concretizations as well as digital ones.
But a blank cell in the middle of cells with content might exist persistently - depending on the representation. And once there is a printout, they would exist persistently - until the printout is destroyed.
Blank cell would probably be a class, like PDF is a class. Instances of PDFs are ICEs and are concretized. Instances of blank cells, at least when persistently recorded, would similarly be ICEs.
PhiBabs935 commentedon Feb 22, 2026
@alanruttenberg I was wondering if you think that spatial grids, such as Discrete Global Grids (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_global_grid) would fall within the purview of Information Structure Entity?
dr-shorthair commentedon Feb 22, 2026
Nice question. Some elaboration to assist:
A DGGS (Discrete Global Grid System) provides identifiers to denote regions on the earth.
Cells are nested to get finer and finer spatial resolution.
Uber uses the H3 hexagonal cell system (with 12 pentagons at each resolution level) - see https://h3geo.org/
Identifiers are 15 hex chars long, like "85be63cffffffff" "88be63ccc7fffff".
The number of f's at the end tells you the resolution (size) of the cell.
The finest cells in H3 are approx 1 m^2.
The nesting is approximate at the edges.
For science, equal-area systems are often preferred, e.g. rHEALPix with nested 'rectangular' cells https://datastore.landcareresearch.co.nz/dataset/rhealpix-discrete-global-grid-system .
Identifiers are like "N18", "R78523", "R7852372" i.e. a single character in the range [N-S] followed by an arbitrary sequence of digits [0-8]*, because each rectangular cell is divided into 9 for the next finer resolution.
(The north pole is N4 or N44 or N444444444 depending how fine resolution you need, south pole is S4444 etc.)
Nesting is exact. The identifier length gives you the resolution, which can be as fine as you need.
And identifier-->containment or adjacency topology is a very cheap operation.
I give these details merely to illustrate that different DGGS lead to very different identifiers.
For any DGG identifier the DGGS must be provided, similar to a CRS for coordinates, or unit-of-measurement for quantities, or the classification system for categorical (nominal or ordinal) values.
alanruttenberg commentedon Feb 24, 2026
A Discrete Global Grid would be a coordinate reference system - a method of assigning names places. As such it would be an ICE, which I have as a Prescriptive Information Content Entity. I have asked CCO to reclassify Coordinate Reference System from descriptive to prescriptive. More specifically, in CCO it would be a Geospatial Coordinate Reference System.
dr-shorthair commentedon Apr 1, 2026
What is the distinction between
Representational Information Content EntityandMedia Content Entity?dr-shorthair commentedon May 1, 2026
Related to #593