Description
Following the breakout session in November 2025, this proposal asks one question: when "Uncertainty" is grounded in ecologists' first-hand research cases rather than imposed by theory, what does it actually refer to and can a formal ontology recover those referents across different cases, or does it break down?
The group runs in two sessions. In the first session (ideally situated at the start of the workshop), participants will describe their research process, specifically where uncertainty arose. Their verbatim will be the basis for what the word “Uncertainty” refers to. After the recording of their accounts, we will demonstrate the realist referent-analysis pipeline (Progressive Constraint Referent Analysis) on one use case. The authors will then process each account outside the breakout session setting with the demonstrated pipeline extracting only positive statements about what was the case and assembles them into a theory-neutral graph model of the situation, structured with the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO 2020), and where useful the Environment Ontology (ENVO). We then project competing definitions of uncertainty onto that model to see which referents each one picks out, and whether the same referent types recur across cases. In the second session (ideally situated at the end of the workshop), the authors present the resulting graphs and projections. Participants then test the result against their own experience: does the model capture the uncertainty they described, and where does it miss?
We expect this break-out sessions to be interesting for a variety of researchers. For example, it offers an ontology-based qualitative method for analyzing subject verbatim for ecologists and the application of metaphysics and argument theory for the philosophers. For computer scientists, it generates empirical data for evaluating whether formal ontology-based methods can represent uncertainty across interdisciplinary cases.
| Topic | Topic 3: Benefits and pitfalls for knowledge graph construction in ecology |
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