Endurants and perdurants in directly depicting ontologies

Issue title: Spatial and Temporal Reasoning

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Bittner, Thomas^; | Donnelly, Maureen | Smith, Barry^;

Affiliations: Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS), Saarland University, Germany | Department of Philosophy, University at Buffalo, USA

Note: [] Corresponding author. E‐mail: thomas.bittner@ifomis.uni‐saarland.de

Abstract: We propose an ontological theory that is powerful enough to describe both complex spatio‐temporal processes and the enduring entities that participate therein. For this purpose we introduce the notion of a directly depicting ontology. Directly depicting ontologies are based on relatively simple languages and fall into two major categories: ontologies of type SPAN and ontologies of type SNAP. These represent two complementary perspectives on reality and employ distinct though compatible systems of categories. A SNAP (snapshot) ontology comprehends enduring entities such as organisms, geographic features, or qualities as they exist at some given moment of time. A SPAN ontology comprehends perduring entities such as processes and their parts and aggregates as they unfold themselves through some temporal interval. We give an axiomatic account of the theory of directly depicting ontologies and of the core parts of the meta‐ontological fragment within which they are embedded.

Keywords: Ontology, spacetime, endurants, perdurants, temporal mereology, substances, processes

Journal: AI Communications, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 247-258, 2004