Scope note

Text

This class comprises the activity of gaining scientific knowledge about particular states of physical reality through empirical evidence, experiments and measurements.

We define observation in the sense of natural sciences, as a kind of human activity: at some place and within some time-span, certain physical things and their behavior and interactions are observed by human sensory impression, and often enhanced by tools and measurement devices.

Observed situations or dimensions may pertain to properties confined to a single instance of S15 Observable Entity or pertain to constellations of multiple instances and relations between them, in particular distances between them.

The output of the internal processes of measurement devices that do not require additional human interaction are in general regarded as part of the observation and not as additional inference. Primary data from measurement devices are regarded in this model to be results of observation and can be interpreted as propositions believed to be true within the (known) tolerances and degree of reliability of the device.

Measurements and witnessing of events are special cases of observations. Observations result in a belief that certain propositions held at a time within the time-span of the observation. In this model, the degree of confidence in the observed properties is regarded to be “true” by default, but could be described differently by adding a property P3 has note to an instance of S4 Observation

Language

en