IT705: A Realist Representation of Social Identity Data

Social identities merit special treatment in realist ontologies. Their ontological status is unsettled, so we should model them in a manner that is agnostic with respect to their ontological status. Nevertheless, there is a clear criterion for determining whether a specific person has a particular identity, namely, whether that person asserts that they do. This social act forms the basis for a realist representation, not of social identities themselves, but of data about social identities. We report the representation of social identities in the Ontology of Medically Related Social Entities and show that it supports data integration and retrieval.