Methodological guidelines to characterize the documents pragmatics dimension in the scope of biomedical ontologies development

Abstract

Ever since societies became too complex to rely solely on oral communication, written documents have filled an important role in the human interaction. The ordinariness of the term “document” masks the complexity involved in defining what a document really is and its significance. Within the realm of Information Science, a written text in a document is analyzed regarding its content for purposes of information retrieval. However, there is no systematic method to characterize documents according to the social effects they bring about. The present paper aims to make a contribution towards this sense and proposes methodological guidelines to characterize the documents pragmatic dimension. We present and discuss cases of such guidelines applied to the organization of documents in ontologies being performed in a biomedical project.