ApplE: An Applied Ethics Ontology with Event Context

2025-02-07

AI Summary

Applied ethics faces challenges in translating abstract moral principles into actionable guidelines and lacks a unified modeling framework for cross-contextual ethical decision-making. To address this, we propose ApplE, an ontology for applied ethics that uniquely integrates event-based contextual semantics into its formal design, bridging philosophical theories with concrete action scenarios and enabling rigorous formalization of moral properties. Methodologically, ApplE is developed via an enhanced SAMOD agile ontology engineering process, implemented in OWL, and rigorously validated through three complementary criteria: logical consistency, ontological completeness, and application validity—while fully adhering to FAIR principles. We demonstrate its efficacy through comprehensive semantic modeling of a bioethics case study. Empirical evaluation confirms that ApplE achieves both philosophical rigor and practical deployability, establishing a scalable foundational architecture for ethical knowledge services and ethically informed intelligent decision support systems.

Technology Category

• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Applications
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Ontologies
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability Modulo Theories

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Provenance, trust, security and privacy, and ethical issues in managing semantic data
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness and ethical considerations in crowd work and in human-in-the-loop AI systems

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.

Problem

• Resolve ethical dilemmas via knowledge representation
• Model morality of actions using event context
• Develop ontology for applied ethics with FAIR principles

Innovation

• Applied Ethics ontology
• Simplified Agile Methodology
• FAIR principles