Clarify if Act of Observation applies to only organisms

[cameronmore]

An Act of Observation is defined as "A Planned Act of acquiring information from a source via the use of one or more senses.". Since we already have processes and functions for sensors, this seems like it implicitly refers to only organisms (which have 'senses' in the way that word seems to be used here). It would be helpful to just clarify this in the definition or another annotation. Maybe something like "via the realization of an organism's sensory dispositions"?

[alanruttenberg]

The label might be changed to "Act of direct observation", if it's the intention that this only be by human senses.

[dr-shorthair]

The W3C/OGC SSN Ontology conceives all Observations as 'Acts'. Observation is a specialization of Execution - see https://w3c.github.io/sdw-sosa-ssn/ssn/#Observations-overview. Sensor is a specialization of System and Asset, and includes physical sensors, humans, and software (in the case of forecasts which are a kind of observation where the phenomenon time is in the future).

Execution is probably a kind of BFO Process. A provisional alignment of SSN to BFO/CCO is currently here in a branch, incomplete and not yet fully reviewed. Comments welcome.

An Observation is made using a Sensor which is typically an instrument but may be a person, or even software (in the case of simulations).

[dr-shorthair]

The proposed alignment between SSN and BFO/CCO is now visible in the mail branch of the editor's draft here: https://w3c.github.io/sdw-sosa-ssn/ssn/#BFO-alignment
with RDF implementation here:
https://github.com/w3c/sdw-sosa-ssn/blob/gh-pages/ssn/rdf/ontology/alignments/sosa-bfo.ttl