BFO/MedO:

Basic Formal Ontology and Medical Ontology

Draft 0.0006 (13. July 03)

3. Basic Formal Ontology consists in a series of sub-ontologies (most properly conceived as a series of perspectives on reality), the most important of which are:

SnapBFO, a series of snapshot ontologies (O_ti ), indexed by times

SpanBFO a single videoscopic ontology (O_v).

Each O_ti is an inventory of all entities existing at a time. O_v is an inventory (processory) of all processes unfolding through time. (Each O_ti is thus analogous to anatomy; O_v is analogous to physiology.) Each snapshot ontology represents a presentistic assay of the entities existing at some given present instant. O_v is a (God’s eye) partition of the totality of processes. Processes are invisible in the snapshot view; substances are invisible in the span view.

2. Both SnapBFO and SpanBFO will serve as basis for a series of sub-ontologies at different levels of granularity. The same portion of reality may appear at a plurality of levels of granularity. Thus masses at one level may be aggregates at another level. What counts as a unitary process at one level may be part of a process-continuum at another level.

3. Each ontology represents some partition of reality into categories or universals. Individual instances (tokens) are to be conceived as being visible by looking (very hard) through the cells depicted in the diagrams below.

4. The ontologies here indicated are partial only (they are windows on just that portion of reality which is visible through the given ontology).

5. The spatial and spatiotemporal regions acknowledged by SnapBFO and SpanBFO are abstract entities which may or may not house concrete entities. The sites and settings of SnapBFO and SpanBFO, in contrast, referred to by expressions such as ‘in the room’, ‘in the lung’, ‘on the table’, ‘the Afghan winter’, ‘Tudor England’, etc., are tied to specific physical boundaries or retainers (such as walls, floors, ceilings). Sites are bound portions of space, which can be bound either completely, as in the case of a closed room or an air-bubble inside your body, or partially, as in the case of a birdcage or nostril. Sites may retain their identity from one instant to the next even though they are projected in succession onto distinct abstract spatial regions (just as substances retain their identity from one instant to the next even though they are projected in succession on distinct aggregates of molecules). Settings are, very roughly, the Cartesian products of sites with intervals of clock or calendar time. They are the spatiotemporal regions occupied by behavior settings in Roger Barker’s sense (the 5pm train to Long Island, the early morning swim, your meeting with the Dean): http://ontology.buffalo.edu/socobj.htm.

6. Where substances fall within the natural world of constant causal change, a quasi-substance such as a chess club belongs to the realm of social-political-administrative entities and changes only as a result of administrative acts such as the admission of a new member. Where qualities, similarly, fall within the natural world of constant causal change, a quasi-quality such as a debt or a rank belongs to the realm of social-political-administrative entities and changes only as a result of administrative acts such as a payment or a waiving of the debt. All roles are quasi-entities (entities not subject to constant causal-energetic changes).

7. Dependent entities, both within the SNAP and within the SPAN ontologies, are divided into relational (for entities dependent on a plurality of entities) and non-relational (for entities dependent on a single entity).

8. SnapBFO distinguishes different sorts of parts of substances: fiat parts (such as your arms and legs, your skin tissue), boundaries (the surface of your body), and structural parts (your shape, the organization or Bauplan of your body). It is in virtue of structural parts that your body must have some color, temperature and mass, even though the specific color, temperature and mass of your body are not parts of the body but rather dependent continuants which depend upon your body as their substrate. Analogously, SpanBFO distinguishes structural parts of processes, which reflect the difference for example between cyclical and non-cyclical processes, between processes of acceleration and deceleration, and so on.