Meal should be an occurent

[ddooley]

http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/ONS_0000085 Meal I believe should be an occurrent - basically an event which has participants and food, and eating processes etc. Right now it is under a dependent continuant, next to quality.

Also if it could be lowercased for consistency.

Cheers,

Damion

[ddooley]

Also, would you consider implementing the breakfast / lunch / supper meals mentioned in NCIT Meal: http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/NCIT_C80248 ?

[FrancescoVit]

The original idea of placing the "meal" under the "dependent specifically continuant" -> "realizable entity" was something like this:

"a meal is not something that happens or exist on its own, its existence depends upon the process of eating and drinking of an individual (maybe also depends upon the process of cooking...)". In fact is defined "eating" realizes some "meal". The "meal" then should define the "dietary pattern", which by this was also linked to the eating and drinking process (this last connection is not present in the ONS I see...)

Not sure if this convoluted reasoning is healthy or not

[ddooley]

Maybe most simply, if a meal is an "occasion" - your def - then its an occurrent. (An entity that has temporal parts and that happens, unfolds or develops through time.) We're not talking about meal as noun, a pile of food to eat in one go - maybe we distinguish these as "meal (occurent)" and "meal (food preparation)".

I'd say it is an occurrent with various processes taking place, and one or more participants, and maybe some cutlery devices!
For me, the question is what kind of occurrent is a meal? It may be a planned process especially if it involves obtaining of food, and a schedule separate from hunger signals. It involves an eating process (maybe realizing a "disposition to eat" , and triggered by a hunger process) that is part of a planned process occurrent called a meal. (Other parts being obtaining of food, cutting/cooking it etc. [edit: or separate that out as "preparing a meal" process.]

What is eaten contributes to a dietary pattern in an observational sense; what is chosen to eat supports or denies a dietary pattern in a prescriptive sense.

[FrancescoVit]

I see you point on the time-related aspects of a meal. Indeed, also our def. with "occasion" imply some sort of time relation; is not something always there. So, I agree to move under the occurrent

I found the class "Event" (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/efo/EFO_0009629 - Something that happens at a given place and time) which could be the super-class concept for the meal, the EFO place this under the "process" occurrent class (BFO_0000015).

thinking it out

[ddooley]

One behind the scenes thing about EFO terms is that they were designed as placeholders until OBOFoundry ontologies could supply the more particular vocabulary home for a term.

I'm looking at COB that is aimed to inherit the common set of terms most people would use, and it starts at top level with "process" (though I see they haven't gotten around to giving it a textual definition or examples yet), also BFO process.

I'm joining you in thinking this through ... thinking event is probably subordinate to process in that process doesn't necessarily have a distinct start or end time in grand scheme of things, whereas events do. On the other hand, events are more colloquially stuff that happens in a certain place at a certain timespan, so that barely fits the definition of process, and certainly not in just a biological/ chemical way. So maybe event is at best a peer of process. I'll check with some COB folks about that. Still "meal" really is a more focused activity that seems to fit within scope of planned process.