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26
Category Theoretic Ontology for Representation
of Assessment Scales and Consensus Guidelines
in Elderly Care
Patrik Eklund
26.1
Introduction
Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh's approach [19] to
medical language
is a first true and com-
plete attempt to provide concrete and detail insight into clinical practice and medical
decision-making based on practiced morality and normative ethics. His 'language
of medicine' is combined with 'medical praxiology' in a very subtle way not seen
before in these contexts. Our discussion on ontology in this paper can be seen, in
the small, to relate to epistemological aspects in Sadegh-Zadeh's presentation on
epistemology, and his book at large will be a continuous inspiration for our further
efforts in this area. Our discussion is not broadly in medicine, and, in fact, not
within medicine only. Ageing and elderly care is a typical <area where 'medical'
and 'social' needs to join forces, and we will point out hopefully some interesting
aspects in this borderline.
The reason for this paper is at least two-fold. On the one hand, we build upon
the extension of general logic, into the so called generalized general logic [10],
and commit ourselves to be extremely aware of the roles as represented by meta-
language for logic and object language actually describing all building blocks of
logic. On the other hand, we show how such a pure category theoretic approach
to ontology provided by this generalized general logic can be used for uncertainty
based information and knowledge representation and, accordingly, how it is used
in decision-making in health and social care. Our examples are drawn from man-
agement of assessment scales and consensus guidelines in care of older people. In
doing this, we then also point out the informal logic character of international stan-
dards of medical ontology, and explain e.g. why logical modelling of uncertainty
becomes too ambiguous in such informal frameworks.
Computerized decision-making in social and health care is traditionally viewed
with ontology not as part of underlying logics for decision-making, but rather
as standards and terminologies including skeletons and frameworks of informal
