Chemistry: Tool or discipline?

Ontology: The Discipline and the Tool

The fields of philosophy and informatics entertain two somewhat different conceptions of ontology. Philosophical ontology is a branch of metaphysics dating back at least to the time of Plato and Aristotle. Ontology in informatics has its origins in the artificial intelligence research of the eighties and nineties. This means that the fields of philosophy and informatics entertain two somewhat d...

Plastic surgery: technique or discipline?

The definition of “plastic surgery” has been subject to a variety of interpretations. To the practitioner who has completed formal training in plastic surgery, it is defined and inherently recognized as a specialty that encompasses a vast body of knowledge and that requires a comprehension of fundamental principles and concepts that allows one to plan and execute a particular operation. In othe...

Journal Descriptor Indexing Tool for Categorizing Text According to Discipline or Semantic Type

A JDI (Journal Descriptor Indexing) tool has been developed at NLM that automatically categorizes biomedical text as input, returning a ranked list, with scores between 0-1, of either JDs (Journal Descriptors, corresponding to biomedical disciplines) or STs (UMLS Semantic Types). Possible applications include WSD (Word Sense Disambiguation) and retrieval according to discipline. The Lexical Sys...

Primary care: political favourite or scientific discipline?

Translation Studies: Pre-Discipline, Discipline, Interdiscipline, and Post-Discipline

In the West, Translation Studies as a discipline has a very short but lively history. Founded in the early 1970s in the Low Countries—Holland and Belgium—translation studies is a fairly new field. Yet, today some theorists suggest that the discipline is too limited to translated texts and excludes much translation data being generated from other fields of inquiry, including theater, art, archit...