Category Theoretic Ontology for Representation of Assessment Scales and Consensus Guidelines in Elderly Care

Abstract

In this paper we show how category theoretic ontology provided by generalized general logic can be used for decision-making with assessment scales and consensus guidelines in social and health care of older people. Computerized decision-making in social and health care is traditionally views ontologies not as part of underlying logics for decision-making, but rather as standards and terminologies including skeletons and frameworks of informal logic structures. Programming in logic is manipulation of terms, and substitution with terms. Classical terms won’t suffice. An ontology building upon classical terms, trying to enhance missing parts in the underlying structures by being clever about inference, becomes logically sterile and basically useless in formal frameworks. We also need to make a distinction between imprecise or vague information, and being formal and accurate in reasoning with vague values. Furthermore, a value may be vague as produced by a crisp operation, or a value is vague since the underlying operation is vague. From formal point of view this is all about underlying categories and monads, and in this paper we will continue investigations showing how the signatures reside in term monads over chosen categories. Our approach is thus monadic, and we consider monads over suitable categories.