ApplE: An Applied Ethics Ontology with Event Context
This work addresses the need for a systematic approach to applied ethics, which is a problem for ethicists, philosophers, and professionals in various domains.
The authors tackled the challenge of resolving ethical dilemmas by developing ApplE, an Applied Ethics ontology that captures philosophical theory and event context, and demonstrated its value through a bioethics use case. The ontology adheres to FAIR principles and aims to be a resource for applied ethicists and ontology engineers.
Applied ethics is ubiquitous in most domains, requiring much deliberation due to its philosophical nature. Varying views often lead to conflicting courses of action where ethical dilemmas become challenging to resolve. Although many factors contribute to such a decision, the major driving forces can be discretized and thus simplified to provide an indicative answer. Knowledge representation and reasoning offer a way to explicitly translate abstract ethical concepts into applicable principles within the context of an event. To achieve this, we propose ApplE, an Applied Ethics ontology that captures philosophical theory and event context to holistically describe the morality of an action. The development process adheres to a modified version of the Simplified Agile Methodology for Ontology Development (SAMOD) and utilizes standard design and publication practices. Using ApplE, we model a use case from the bioethics domain that demonstrates our ontology's social and scientific value. Apart from the ontological reasoning and quality checks, ApplE is also evaluated using the three-fold testing process of SAMOD. ApplE follows FAIR principles and aims to be a viable resource for applied ethicists and ontology engineers.