Information content entities, qualities of bearers, and measurement units, information structure

[alanruttenberg]

Definition of information content entity:

Information Content Entity is here intended to be a class of Entities whose instances are the informational content of Information Bearing Entities. For example, three instances of information bearers -- such as a bar chart, color-coded map, and a written report -- each of which lists the GDP of Countries for the year 2010 are each different carriers of the same information content. It is this content that is generically dependent upon its carrier. This treatment of Informational Content Entity (cf. the Information Artifact Ontology) leads to a principle of subtyping based upon the relationship that ICE's have with the Entity they are about rather than characteristics such as format, language, measurement scale, or media. The latter are treated here as being Qualities of bearers.
[my emphasis]

The comment about measurement scale not being a concern of ICEs seems to conflict with the fact that measurement unit is a subclass of ICE.
Language is defined as

A Directive Information Content Entity that prescribes a canonical format for communication.

So a format, subclass of ICE, explicitly excluded by the emphasized text.

I have a couple of thoughts about this but would appreciate comments or clarification.

1. The whole comment should just be deleted. Depending on how one defines allowable concretizations of an ICE these might or might not be aspects of the ICE. We don't currently have a relation between ICEs that share concretizations, but might have one e.g. One ICE might allow the content to be expressed in any language, and a second only in English. The relation is that the concretizations of the latter are subset of the concretizations of the former.

2. Measurement unit, language, format belong under (the as yet undefined) information structure. For instance the two classes in the first content might differ in that the former is structured with a language but not any particular language, but the latter structured only by English.

I lean towards implementing (2), adding the relation mentioned in (1), then changing the comment to reflect that those characteristics are of structure, not qualities.

A tentative definition of information structure:

a generically dependent continuant that is not, by itself, about something but which instead wholly or partially organizes the parts of some information content entity, contributing to its interpretability.

Examples: Matrix structure, rasterized structure, video structure, list structure, textural structure, SVG format, spreadsheet structure, the English language, glyph

This paper mentions information structure entity, however, the idea isn't developed very far.

Information Structure Entity (ISE). An ISE is a structural part of an ICE; speaking metaphorically, it is an ICE with the content removed: for example an empty cell in a spreadsheet; a blank Microsoft Word file. ISEs thus capture part of what is involved when we talk about the ‘format’ of an IA

More to say about this, but let's hear first impressions.