Formal Ontology of Voting Systems
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Hi voting folks. I have a habit of throwing ideas out to see if anybody finds them interesting enough to pursue, some day my hope is not to be too busy to pursue some of them myself. But I recently have been learning about formal ontology, which is a significant problem in biology (for example, how do we define "cell identity" in a robust and functional way?). It has me thinking of various uses for formal ontology, and I think this is an area that could be helpful in describing voting systems in a way that is at least quasi-universal, given that everybody is appealing to the same standards.
This is an area that I want to learn more about, but there is a language called Basic Formal Ontology that is an abstraction of the Gene Ontology, and seems to be used in a variety of different fields. I wonder if this would be interesting at all to see if there are any good ontologies of voting systems. My hope in that regard would be that possibly in exploring this general structure, we might be able to come to a stronger consensus across "camps" of what constitutes a "good" system, or at least come to a clearer understanding of the principles guiding the judgments of different groups so that they might be analyzed more formally, kind of like how a philosophical argument should be laid out clearly in premises, arguments, and conclusions.
I ordered a text on this language, and I hope to be able to explore and/or utilize it for my own purposes. I think it would be an interesting project if this doesn't already exist.