ApplE: An Applied Ethics Ontology with Event Context

TL;DR

The paper introduces ApplE, an Applied Ethics ontology designed to encode both ethical theories and event context to support context-aware moral reasoning in real-world decisions. It presents a hybrid development methodology (SAMOD with Spiral-inspired iterations) and a dual-module structure: the Applied Ethics Module for theory and the Event Context Module for situational factors, demonstrated via a bioethics use case on opioid prescribing. The ontology is built in Protege with reuse of established ontologies, validated through competency questions, DL/SWRL reasoning, and multiple quality checks, and is aligned with FAIR principles with thorough documentation and maintenance plans. The work highlights a rigorous evaluation pipeline (model, data, query testing) and discusses limitations and future directions, including modular domain ontologies and integration with learning-based reasoning to support automated ethical judgments in 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.

Figures (5)

• Figure 1: A representation of the hybrid methodology inspired by the Spiral methodology at a macro-level and the SAMOD methodology at a micro-level.
• Figure 2: An intermediate representation of the ApplE ontology with the two interacting modules. These models have been expanded in the following sections.
• Figure 3: An intermediate diagram that shows the applied ethics module of the Applied Ethics ontology. Some instances and classes have been omitted from this diagram for the sake of brevity.
• Figure 4: An intermediate diagram that shows the event context module of the Applied Ethics ontology. Some instances and classes have been omitted from this diagram for brevity.
• Figure 5: A detailed diagram to show how the data exemplar is modeled using the ontology for the Bioethics domain. A similar modeling may be done for any other event of another domain. One of the SWRL rules is displayed to show that it found a match within the provided data and assigned PrescribeOpioidPainkiller as a Morally Wrong Action accordingly. A few axioms have been omitted for the sake of brevity.