ApplE: An Applied Ethics Ontology with Event Context

TL;DR

ApplE is an ontology that models applied ethics within event contexts, enabling explicit reasoning about moral decisions and supporting ethical deliberation across domains.

Contribution

It introduces a novel applied ethics ontology incorporating event context and philosophical theory, developed with a modified agile methodology for practical reasoning.

Findings

Successfully models bioethics case study

Demonstrates reasoning and quality checks of the ontology

Aligns with FAIR principles for resource sharing

Abstract

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.