Saturday, November 19, 2005
Center of Excellence Proposal
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ONTAC stands for Ontology and Taxonomy Coordinating Working Group
It is a working group of
Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP)
Communication from John Sowa on process ontology
Dear Matthew,
You make an important point, which gets into very serious questions about how various ontologies should be related to one another:
MW: For those that are not familiar, ISO 15926 is
a 4D ontology and so does not recognize physical
objects as continuants (things that are wholly present
at each point in time and so do not have temporal
parts) but considers them to be spatio-temporal extents
(extended in time and having temporal parts or states).
BFO takes the alternate view, hence the banter.
If we are discussing the most fundamental issues of what exists and how it could best be characterized, I prefer Whitehead's process ontology, which is explicitly 4-D and which considers processes to be fundamental.
A physical object -- typically called a continuant in some ontologies -- would be described by Whitehead as a long-lived process that is characterized by a "form of definiteness" -- a pattern that enables the process to be recognized at different occasions.
When the pattern becomes established, one would say that the object is created or born, and when the pattern is no longer recognizable, one would say that the object is destroyed or dies.
An example I like to use is the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, which has been observed over a period of several centuries. Yet its "form of definiteness" lies on a continuum that includes such transient events as a dust devil or a tornado, up to longer lived events such as hurricanes with names like Katrina or Hugo, and on the far end of the scale, the Great Red Spot.
For medical applications, either ontology is applicable. You could call a heart or a liver a continuant, or you could call it a long-lived process with a particular form of definiteness. When you get to microbiology, the process view becomes a more and more natural way of describing what is going on.
John