Thank you! I'll look at/read "Applied ontology: an introduction" (ed. by Munn and Smith) - the results are rather varied and have their own developed terminology, and this one looks as good place to start as any.
Edit to add: tentatively, the "automated information systems" angle might not be what I'm looking for:(
Automated information system require fixed vocabulary.
If people who observe rats have a different idea about what a leg happens to be then the people who study humans (the leg is the part between the foot and the knee) there are problems with translating knowledge.
Humans might be smart enough to do the translation but computers won't. As a result there's interest in standardization. Bioinformatics needs the standardization and that's where Barry Smith comes from. Bioinformatics has the interests in standardization because automated information systems do...
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