COSMO ontology, Version 0.54-731. Last edit 20080928 by Patrick Cassidy Has 21 top-level classes under 'Thing' Uses elements of the OpenCyc OWL version 0.78, SUMO, BFO and DOLCE ontologies, as well as elements created specifically for COSMO. Parts of COSMO are adopted or closely aligned with elements of other public ontologies such as OpenCyc, SUMO, and BFO. From the documentation of those ontologies, they are freely usable by the public, though they remain copyrighted by their originators (more detail below). No copyright restrictions are attached to materials added in the COSMO project, therefore the only copyright restrictions for use of this ontology are those placed by the developers of the OpenCyc, SUMO, and BFO on elements derived directly from those works. Relation of COSMO to other ontologies: The COSMO ontology has a structure and basic viewpoint that differs in some significant parts from that of the ontologies from which it has adopted materials, and the main parts of the hierarchical structure and relations are not significantly derived from any of the referenced ontologies. Most basically, the representations were intended to adhere as closely as possible to linguistic intuitions about the meaning and usage of English terms, while specifying the meanings in a logically precise manner. Every element added to COSMO is individually evaluated for its utility and validity within the conceptual structure of the COSMO ontology, and is not derived or adopted solely or mainly on the basis of the appearance of a similar concept in another ontology. Certain individual subtype relations are similar to those in OpenCyc or SUMO; but because the basic hierarchical structure of COSMO differs from the other ontologies, logical inference using these relations will arrive at conclusions that cannot be aligned directly with either OpenCyc or SUMO. No mapping between COSMO and these other ontologies is likely to enable accurate inference. The documentation derived from OpenCyc and SUMO is provided as a means to reference similar concepts in those other ontologies, and to explain similarities and differences, for the convenience of those who are familiar with those ontologies. Contents derived from OpenCyc and SUMO are copyrighted and made freely available for public use under the terms found in the documentation for those works (see below). Materials added specifically for the COSMO project are not copyrighted. The contents derived from SUMO are copyrighted by the IEEE and made freely available for public use. For more detail see: see http://www.ontologyportal.org A description of the SUMO project can be found in: Niles, I., and Pease, A. 2001. Towards a Standard Upper Ontology. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS-2001), Chris Welty and Barry Smith, eds, Ogunquit, Maine, October 17-19, 2001. The Contents of the OpenCyc OWL version used in this project are found at: http://www.cyc.com/2004/06/04/cyc OpenCyc materials are copyrighted and licensed for free public use under the GNU 'LGPL' license. The Opencyc documentation reads: ************ OpenCyc copyright notice ****************** Copyright Information OpenCyc Knowledge Base Copyright 2001-2004 Cycorp, Inc., Austin, TX, USA. All rights reserved. OpenCyc Knowledge Server Copyright 2001-2004 Cycorp, Inc., Austin, TX, USA. All rights reserved. Other copyrights may be found in various files. The OpenCyc Knowledge Base The OpenCyc Knowledge Base consists of code, written in the declarative language CycL, that represents or supports the representation of facts and rules pertaining to consensus reality. OpenCyc is licensed using the GNU Lesser General Public License, whose text can also be found on this volume. The OpenCyc CycL code base is the "library" referred to in the LGPL license. The terms of this license equally apply to renamings and other logically equivalent reformulations of the Knowledge Base (or portions thereof) in any natural or formal language. See http://www.opencyc.org for more information. ************ OpenCyc copyright notice ****************** Definitions described as coming from the 'Random House Webster' (RHW) refer to the Electronic Dictionary 'Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary' on CD (2002) from Random House, Inc. and Multimedia 2000 Inc.(a paperback version is still available at: http://www.randomhouse.com/category/reference/) Some of the entries have annotation references to WordNet ('wordnet' and 'wnsense' relations). The WordNet version referenced is WordNet 2.1 (see http://wordnet.princeton.edu/). Because the WordNet hierarchy differs from that of COSMO, these pointers are only informative, and may not be useful for accurate automatic conversion of WordNet sense tags to the corresponding senses in COSMO, but the utility of this mapping needs to be investigated. InheritableType is a specialization of the Protege owl:Class which is used to identify those metatypes which, when specified as the parent Type for some class (Type) in the ontology, will also by implication be the parent Type for all subtypes of any Type explicitly designated as an instance of any subtype of 'InheritableType'. This is a primitive mechanism to permit translation of this ontology among various formats, while permitting the use of reasoning engines which require that arguments to relations, if restricted as to Type, be instances of some specified Type. There are some ontologies, such as SUMO, using first-order logic, which permit one to specify that an argument to a relation must be a *subtype* of some Type in the ontology, rather than an *instance* of some Type. OWL and some other reasoning engines do not permit that kind of restriction. For convenience, to allow this ontology to be used in multiple reasoning engines and to be automatically translated into multiple formats, this metatype is provided and so that one can avoid having to specify the metatype instance of every Type that is to be used as an argument to a relation. When using this ontology in an inference engine that requires explicit types, it will be necessary to add the InheritableType as a Type of each subtype of any Type that is specified to be an instance of such an inheritable type. That addition will have to be one in a preprocessing stage before using that inference engine. An axiom may be added to an ontology using FOL to specify that all subtypes of a Type ?T that is an instance of an InheritableType ?MT will also be instances of that InheritableType: (=> (and (isanInstanceOf ?T ?MT) (isaSubclassOf ?MT InheritableType)) (forall (?ST) (=> (isaSubclassOf ?ST ?T) (isanInstanceOf ?ST ?MT)))) This axiom will permit the ontologist to avoid specifying the metatype for every subtype of the root type of that Type tree, in those ontology implementations that can use FOL. RoleType is a metaclass used as the Type restriction on certain relations that take subclasses of Role as their argument. 'QuantifierType' is a metaclass used as the Type restriction on certain relations that take subclasses of Quantifier as their argument. AttributeValueType is a metaclass used as the Type restriction on certain relations that take subclasses of AttributeValue as their argument. QualitativeAttributeType is a metatype which is a specialization of the Protege owl:Class that can serve as type for taste attributes and an argument restriction for some relations on QualitativeAttributes. This is a primitive mechanism to accommodate OWL limitations. IntensiveAttributeValueType is a metaclass used as the Type restriction on certain relations that take subclasses of IntensiveAttributeValue as their argument. a metatype that can be used as an argument restriction for relations that take a subtype of Event as one of their arguments.. ObjectType is a metatype which is a specialization of the Protege owl:Class that can serve as type for objects, whether abstract or physical, and an argument restriction for various relations on Object types. This is a primitive mechanism to accommodate OWL limitations on relation arguments. PhysicalObjectType is a metatype which is a specialization of the Protege owl:Class that can serve as type for physical objects and an argument restriction for various relations on Physical Object types. This is a primitive mechanism to accommodate OWL limitations on relation arguments. 'PropositionType' is a metatype which is a specialization of the Protege owl:Class that can serve as type for Propositions and an argument restriction for various relations on Propositions types. This is a primitive mechanism to accommodate OWL limitations on relation arguments. BiologicalOrgan is a metaclass used as the Type restriction on certain relations that pertain to named parts of organisms at particular stages of their life cycle. It is not necessarily an animal body part type - it may be part of a plant. a metatype that can be used as an argument restriction for relations that take an instance of Location as one of their arguments.. a metatype that can be used as an argument restriction for relations that take an instance of Feature as one of their arguments.. A collection of specializations of #$AnimalBodyRegion. Each instance of #$AnimalBodyPartType is a collection of body parts, where the parts in question are differentiated from other body parts according to structure or function. Instances of #$AnimalBodyPartType include #$SpinalColumn, #$Eyelash, #$NervousSystem, #$Urethra, #$Wing-AnimalBodyPart, and #$HeelOfPalm. bd58e7da-9c29-11b19dad-c379636f7270 'ProductType' is a metatype that can be used as an argument restriction for relations that take an instance of Product (i.e. something for sale) as one of their arguments.. GroupType is a metatype which is a specialization of the Protege owl:Class that can serve as type for physical objects and an argument restriction for various relations on types of Groups (not just People, but any type of Group). This is a primitive mechanism to accommodate OWL limitations on relation arguments. SubstanceType is a metatype which is a specialization of the Protege owl:Class that can serve as type for physical substances and an argument restriction for the hasComponentSubstance relation. This is a primitive mechanism to accommodate OWL limitations on relation arguments. The restriction on hasGrainDiameter for SubstanceTypes should require subclasses rather than instances of LengthMeasure - instances may have to be created as a workaround. FoodType is a metatype which is a specialization of the Protege owl:Class that can serve as type for different kinds of Food (a Substance). This is a primitive mechanism to accommodate OWL limitations on relation arguments. FoodType is a metatype which is a specialization of the Protege owl:Class that can serve as type for different kinds of FoodObject (a PhysicalObject). This is a primitive mechanism to accommodate OWL limitations on relation arguments. COSMO note: used for both substances and Objects. @ToDo (v0.50) Probably should be distinguished. Cyc: A collection of collections, and a specialization of #$ManufacturedGoodsType. Instances of this collection are types of pharmaceutical products that may be prescribed by a medical professional. Note that this includes drugs -- specializations of #$DrugSubstance -- as well as pharmaceutical devices such as #$TestStrip or #$HearingAid-Prescription. #$PrescriptionDrugType and #$OverTheCounterDrugType are among the specializations of this collection. c0fdf171-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A pointer to the word in the LDOCE (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English) defining vocabulary which the given element represents. Since the LDOCE words can be polysemous, and the nominalized forms of verbs in the COSMO will not be identical to verb meanings, this is not intended as a one-to one mapping, but in many cases the occurrence of a word in a text will be related to the COSMO concept representation by a more or less complex transformation. Longman vocabulary word A pointer to the synset in WordNet 2.1 which the given element represents. The pointer will in fact be to one of the words in the synset, and the sense number of that word in that synset will be found with the 'wnsense' relation. This pointer does not include the offset number. This can be used with a SPARQL query to find all of the ontology elements that correspond to senses for a given word. Wordnet vocabulary word A pointer to the sense number (and POS, if needed) in WordNet 2.1 which the given element represents. This is only needed if there is more than one WordNet sense for the word labeled by the 'wordnet' relation. The sense number should include the word whose sense number is referenced, since more than one Wordnet word may be used to label a particular concept. The usage is exemplified by these relations on 'Ordering': wordnet - order - /wordnet wordnet - command - /wordnet wnsense - order1v /wnsense wnsense - command2v - /wnsense WordNet sense. A pointer to the word in Anna Wierzbicka's 'natural semantic metalanguage' of 60 conceptual primitives that corresponds to the ontology element. NSM word Objects can be Physical or Abstract or Mental only PhysicalObjects have mass, and that is the defining characteristic of a PhysicalObject in COSMO. All Objects have at least one relation other than the type (isa) relation to some other entity that is not an Object. Almost all objects have an Attribute or AttributeValue. But the relation may be some other relation (e.g. to have a location, a composition, or to have proper parts). Thus a point can have Dimensionality (zero-dimensional), and will have a location, though the location may be in a poorly defined abstract space. For example, a character in an alphabet is an abstract object, which has at least one representation as a shaped physical object, and is an element of an Alphabet. This requirement for an Object to have some relation is not presently (v0.48) formalized in COSMO, as it is not needed for performance, only to clarify the meaning for the human users. 'Object' is a very primitive concept that cannot be defined, but can be comprehended only by the way this concept interacts with other concepts, and by its subclasses and instances. This Type is useful as an umbrella Type for various purposes,including relations on Events. NOTE that in COSMO an 'Object' is not necessarily 3D (as in an endurantist perspective) nor 4D (as in a perdurantist perspective. It can be use in syntactic constructions that appear to be 3D (such as when they are explicitly time-indexed), but when an object is also an instance of TimeSlice,it can be used in syntactic constructions that are typical of the 4D perspective, in which the time of a relation is not explicitly indexed. SetOrCollection[Cyc]%SetOrClass[SUMO] COSMO: SetOrType is the union of theTypes Set and Type. 'Type' in COSMO is used to refer to those intensionally-defined groupings called: Class in Ontolingua and Protege; Class in RDF and OWL; Class in SUMO; Collection in OpenCyc; Universal in DOLCE; Property in Ontology Works' IODE system * The Class 'Type' in COSMO is intended to be equivalent to the classes by those names in those other ontologies. * (isaSubtypeOf A B) means that Type A is a subtype of Type B and that all instance of Type A are also instances of Type B. COSMO: Each PhysicalSubstance is an abstraction representing the properties of aggregates composed of multiple small objects of a common type; the notion of a PhysicalSubstance includes any of the common 'substances' we encounter every day: water, air, sugar, salt, coffee (ground or as a drink), beer, meat, steel, plastic, etc., as well as less common substanes such as ion plasma and groups of elementary particles. Every PhysicalSubstance has some basic unit which is the smallest object that can be considered as composed of that substance. For chemical elements the basic unit is an atom; for chemical compounds, the molecule; for sand, one grain of sand, etc. For PhysicalSubstances that are composed of mixtures (e.g. concrete), the formal notion of a 'grain' is used, the 'grain' being the size of the smallest object composed of a substance, that can be subdivided so that the pieces are still objects composed of the same substance. The 'grain' will in general be eight times the size of the 'unit' (allowing division in any of three planes) , but for mixtures the 'unit' may be difficult to identify, and the 'grain' will be the only object identifed as characterizing the PhysicalSubstance. For mixtures, the size of the grain will depend on the sizes and proportions of the constituent objects. Thus in concrete, the grain will have to be at least several times as large as the largest pebble of gravel used in the mixture. The commonly understood properties of substances such as water are characteristic only of aggregates of the basic units (atoms, molecules, grains). To approximate the commonly measured properties (boiling point, melting point, density, etc.) the number of basic units may need to be fairly large; this will also vary with the substance. As of v0.52 this issue is not addressed. This concept must not be construed as a physical object made of some substance (which is the way substances are represented in Cyc - see CycNote below).. PhysicalObjects which are relatively homogeneous (the atmosphere, the ocean) can be construed as consisting of one or more PhysicalSubstances, but they are not substances per se, but specific quantities of a substance, which is one way to view a PhysicalObject. For generality in COSMO, a 'PhysicalSubstance' is the material of which anything with mass is composed, including quantities of subatomic particles that are contained in a certain region of space (such as a plasma in a Tokomak, or a group of electrons in a particle accelerator). However, the term is usually applied only to 'ordinary matter' (solid, liquid, gas); in those cases the unit is an atom or molecule, and the 'grain size' of any PhysicalSubstance that is 'ordinary matter' must contain at least 8 atoms or 8 molecules (so that it can be divided in two in any axis and still have multiple units in the resulting parts). IMPORTANT NOTE: PhysicalSubstances are categorized by the main consitutent. Therefore 'SeaWater' is considered as a subtype of 'Water'. The pure chemical substances can be represented when desirable by creating a 'Pure' category under the general heading (or, if functions are used, by using a '(Pure X)' function.) Thus we have a Type called 'PureWater'. Steel with iron as the majority constituent might be considered as a subtype of 'Iron'. COSMO note: Because substances are represented in COSMO as Types (classes) rather than instances, the specification of properties of substances gets involved, and the intended meanings cannot be specified fully without the use of FOL. As placeholders, some relations between substances are specified, and in OWL these will be interprted as applying only to those specific Substances (Type that are instances of SubstanceType), while the intended meaning is that the relation applies not only to the particular Type but to all subtypes as well. The translation of the OWL ontology to FOL should carefully handle these placeholder relations to be sure they are translated properly. . The restriction on hasGrainDiameter for SubstanceTypes (which see) should require subclasses rather than instances of LengthMeasure - instances may have to be created as a workaround. (still not decided, v0.43). NOTE that a substance at some particular concentration is a subtype of that substance. To expresss that an object contains a particular concentration of a substance, one can create a subclass of that substance having the appropriate concentration attribute, and relate the object to that concentration of substance by the relation 'hasConstituentSubstance'. This representation solves some logical problems, but creates implementation problems in restricted logics such as OWL. COSMO uses relations such as 'hasComponentSubstance', which takes PhysicalSubstance types (instances of the metatype 'SubtanceType') as the 'range' restriction. There are also relations which have subtypes of 'PhysicalSubstance' (instances of 'SubstanceType') as the domain restriction. This can be accommodated in OWL. However, in order to have restrictions apply to subtypes of types, the OWL restriction mechanism interprets the restriction as applying to instances of the type (OWL class). There are no instances of PhysicalSubstance types in COSMO, and the restriction is intended to apply to the subtypes, not to instances. Such restrictions on PhysicalSubstances will have to be interpreted by applications as meaning that the substance represented by the class has those properties. One way to solve the problem might be to create a metatype for each substance Type (i.e. for each of millions of substances), and have the restriction apply to the metatype - but this duplicates Types as metatypes, and is unworkable. COSMO leavee the proper implementation to the application, atl least until it is converted in to an FOL version, where the proper interpretations can be specified by rules. CycNote: In Cyc, PhysicalSubstance's are not represented by a tree in the hierarchy, but are represented by types that are physical objects ('Partiallytangible') and also instances of 'ExistingStufType'. In effect, Cyc considers a 'substance' as the type consisting of all PhysicalObjects that are homogeneous (down to a certain granularity) and having a certain composition. This can be translated into the COSMO representation at the type and instance level, but the Cyc metatypes are not represented in COSMO. See 'HomogeneousObject' Cyc: 'ExistingStuffType' A collection of collections, and a specialization of #$TemporalStuffType. Each instance of #$ExistingStuffType is a collection of things (including portions of things) which are both temporally and spatially stufflike. Division in time or space does not destroy the stufflike quality of the object (down to a certain granularity). (#$isa STUFFTYPE #$ExistingStuffType) implies both (i) for most instances STUFF of STUFFTYPE, for any proper physical part (see #$physicalParts) PART of STUFF, PART is also an instance of STUFFTYPE and (ii) for all instances STUFF of STUFFTYPE, for most proper physical parts PART of STUFF, PART is also an instance of STUFFTYPE. For example, every piece of wood is temporally stufflike: if W-168 is a piece of wood during 1996, then it's also a piece of wood for the one-minute time-slice 9:05am 7/7/96. It's also spatially stufflike: if we take that piece of wood W-168 and cut it in half, we have two things which are both pieces of wood. Since every piece of wood is both temporally and spatially stufflike, #$Wood is an instance of #$ExistingStuffType. Other instances of #$ExistingStuffType include the collections #$AppleJuice, #$IceCream, #$Diamond, #$WaxedPaper, and #$StriatedMuscle. See the comment for #$StuffType to learn more about the distinctions between, and the need for, these four collections: #$StuffType, #$ObjectType, #$ExistingStuffType, and #$ExistingObjectType. The senses 1 and 2 of 'matter' in Random House Webster are conceptually the same as this type, where COSMO interprets sense 2 is the most generic 'matter' of which the instances of sense 1 are subtypes: 1. the substance or substances of which any physical object consists or is composed: the matter of which the earth is made. 2. physical or corporeal substance in general, whether solid, liquid, or gaseous, esp. as distinguished from incorporeal substance, as spirit or mind, or from qualities, actions, and the like. Corresponds to noun sense 2 of 'substance' and sense 1 of 'stuff' and sense 1 of 'matter' and sense 1 of 'material' in WordNet; however, 'substance' is not related to 'stuff' and 'stuff' is not related to 'matter' in WordNet, and 'matter' is not used typically as a synonym of 'substance' in ordinary speech. This difference in usage reflects a difference in the way 'substances' are conceived - as either some abstract stuff of which objects consist, or of the collections of all objects of that composition, as in Cyc. COSMO chooses the notion of an abstract 'stuff'. A noun like 'matter' which, if it were taken to have a collective reading as 'all physical objects, collectively' would thereby conform to the Cyc method of representing PhysicalSubstance, and would then consistently be reinterpreted in COSMO as the same concept as 'PhysicalSubstance'. WN 'substance': 2. (4) substance - (the stuff of which an object consists) WN 'stuff': 1. (6) material, stuff - (the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object; 'coal is a hard black material'; 'wheat is the stuff they use to make bread') WN material: 1. (448) material, stuff - (the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object; 'coal is a hard black material'; 'wheat is the stuff they use to make bread') WN 'matter': 1. (41) substance, matter - (that which has mass and occupies space; an atom is the smallest indivisible unit of matter') matter substance substance2n stuff stuff1n material material1n matter matter1n hasUnitObject relates a PhysicalSubstance to the PhysicalObjects that are the characteristic objects that constitute the substance. For example, a ChemicalElement hasUnitObject Atom. consistsOfMany relates a granular material consisting of multiple individual objects of the same type (e.g. sand), considered as a Substance, to the individual objects. This is similar to and a subproperty of 'hasUnitObject', but is restricted to granular materials, whereas the parent 'hasUnitObject' can be used to treat large quantities of any object as a substance. ConceptualWork[Cyc] In COSMO a 'ConceptualWork' (a MentalObject) is classified as an AbstractSymbolicObject, since such works are always created in symbols, though the symbols may have information content - the 'meaning'. COSMO differs somewhat from the Cyc description in that we consider Codes to be included, but have a different usage of the term 'Code'. Cyc: OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002 The collection of abstract works which are the deliberate creations of one or more individuals working in concert, have instantiations [#$instantiationOfCW] which are #$InformationBearingThings, and associated #$AbstractInformationStructures. This is a specialization of #$DevisedPracticeOrWork [q.v.]. For works with propositional content see the more specific collection, #$PropositionalConceptualWork (PCW). Positive examples include: #$MobyDickNovel (as opposed to any instances of #$BookCopy such that (#$instantiationOfCW #$MobyDickNovel BOOK_COPY)), Beethoven's 9th Symphony (as opposed to any performance of this symphony or any copy of its score). Negative examples include: games (performances are not IBTs), awards (they do not have associated #$AbstractInformationStructures), paintings (not abstract), customs (not deliberate creations), natural languages (not a deliberate creation), and codes (their uses, not instantiations, are IBTs). A AbstractSymbol is a unit mental object which is created to serve as a Symbol, and cannot be broken in parts without destroying much of the meaning of the symbol. Examples are single characters in some language or graphical icons representing ideas or objects. The more interesting Symbols are texts and images. An AbstractCharacter is an AbstractSymbol that is one of the symbols contained in some linguistic alphabet, or any other symbol used in typography or in the control of format during electronic transmission of information. In information processing systems, any sequence of bits having the proper length for use in strings (e.g., seven bits or eight bits or sixteen bits) can count as an AbstractCharacter, the length depending on the computational context. An AbstractCharacter will have a graphical representation (may have multiple different representations in different fonts), and the graphical representations can be distinguished from each other by their shape, but as an AbstractCharacter per se, it can have properties that are independent of the shape, such as the fact that a certain sequence of characters form a certain word. Therefore it is necessary to maintain the distinciton between an AbstracgtCharacgter and its graphical representation. For example, a pdf document may have page images that consist wholly of representations of text - yet it is stored as an image. The distinction has to be made between such images of text and the AbstractText that is represented by that image, and the distinction must be in the way the image is composed - of lines, pixels, or other graphical elements, whereas the text is a linear arrangement of abstract characters, requiring no specification of graphical form for the characters. Specifying the graphical representation of an AbstractCharacter is not essential to distinguish one AbstractCharacter from another, at the abstract level. hasShape relates abstrct figures, substances, substance types, or individual objects to one or more shapes that describe the spatial form of that entity. When applied to substances, the shape description (e.g. 'lumpy') will be interpreted as a description of objects (quantities of substance) that are composed predominantly of that substance. For abstract geometric figures, the shape may be precise, with infinitely precise edges. For real-world objects, the shape will be only approximate, and in some cases very approximate. isInList relates some symbol to a List that contains that symbol as an element. SUMO (named 'inList' in SUMO): The analog of 'element' and 'instance' for Lists. (inList ?OBJ ?LIST) means that ?OBJ is in the List ?LIST. For example, (inList Tuesday (ListFn Monday Tuesday Wednesday)) would be true. An AbstractText is the abstract representation of some linguistic expressions. The text may have formatting, such as columns and rows, beyond simple linear text. An AbstractString is a linear array (A List) of basic characters in some character set (not necessarily just an alphabet). It is the abstract representation of the characters, and the base string will not have any formatting, either of font or size or capitalization. Formatting can be represented as attributes of a String. Every defined instance of AbstractString should be represented by a datatype String using the relation 'hasStringRepresentation', unless it is a binary string, or has a number of bits that is not evenly divisible by 8 (in which case, a BinaryString should be used). The name of the AbstractString in the ontology can be very much shorter than the actual String represented; e.g. the string representation of AbstractString 'WarAndPeace' might be the full text of a long book.. description (from DOLCE-D_S) From DOLCE (Descriptions and Specifications): A description is a social object which represents a conceptualization (e.g. a mental object or state), hence it is generically dependent on some agent and communicable. Descriptions define or use concepts or figures, are expressed by an information object and can be satisfied by situations. The typology of descriptions is still preliminary. In COSMO, a Description is somewhat more specific: it is two or more assertions that all include the same entity as one of the arguments, and it is a MentalObject created to enable an Intelli"gentAgent to understand the nature of that entity. wasCreatedBy relates an Artifact (concrete or abstract) to the Agent or Agents who created it. Knowing the identity of one creator (e.g. of an artifact) does not guarantee that one knows the identity of all creators. @ToDo: NOTE: as of v0.52, ArtificialSubstance is included in the domain as a subtype of 'Artifact-generic', but this should be restricted to objects, since it is quantities of ArtificialSubstance that are actually created by agents, not the abstract substance. Change the range to some subtype of 'Artifact-generic'?? NOTE that the range includes an AbstractString, which is semantically nonsense, but is included as a pragmatic tactic to allow subrelations of this relation to be used in mapping database records to their creators. The creators will sometimes be represented in the database only as a string, and in such cases an implementing system, at its option, can avoid creating a new Person object (instead creating an AbstractString object), when the system cannot identify the 'creator' of the record. This tactic may change as the ontology is further developed, and experience with mapping databases increases.. Specification[COSMO-suggested] COSMO: A Specification is a broad category of intentionally created abstract informational artifacts whose purpose is to describe the structure of a thing or a series of steps that may be taken to construct a thing or to accomplish a goal. It is a mental object having ordered components,the order of which is designed to accomplish a purpose. The steps may be abstract things like computational events or game rules, or physical things such as in industrial processes. The format of a formatted document is a specification,i.e. it specifies how a document of that type is to be constructed. Likewise a grammar or computer program is a specification. A specification does not necessarily require that the steps be in sequence. If they must be in sequence, it is a procedure. This differs somewhat from the Cyc 'Specification': Cyc comment: A specialization of #$ConceptualWork. Each instance of #$Specification is an abstract work that constitutes a description of the properties of a #$Situation or a #$SomethingExisting, and sometimes even entire collections of such things. Things are made, bought, and searched for according to specifications, which can be instantiated as printed instructions or as diagrams. This collection is modally neutral with regard to the descriptive character of its instances. Thus, it includes descriptions of how things are, were, should be, must be, etc. This is the most general Type in which to collect patterns of different kinds - visual, sound patterns, numerical patterns, behavioral patterns, etc. In COSMO, a Pattern is a Specification, which means that it is a kind of MentalObject. That means that Patterns do not have existence unless created by IntelligentAgents. This will probably seem odd to some people, who would prefer to think that patterns have an independent existence - especially when geometric figures are subtypes of 'Pattern'. At this point, there is no reason to classify Patterns in any way other than as specifications that people create to classify some types of relations that obejcts within groups of things may have to each other. If some reason is presented to consider patterns as independent of the way people use them, that may be a different concept, or may warrant reclassification. This is the most general Type in which to collect visual patterns - geometric designs, fingerprint patterns, artifact structural patterns, appearances, shapes, outlines, etc.. NOTE that an abstract image itself (e.g. an image of a fingerprint) can be a pattern. An instance of #$GeometricShapeType and a specialization of #$GeometricallyDescribableThing-Intangible and #$HomogeneousExtendedSpaceRegion (qq.v.). This is the collection of geometrical figures, conceived of as bounded (one- or higher-dimensional) regions of space. Neither a single point (see #$GeometricalPoint), nor a sum of scattered points, is an instance of #$Figure-Geometrical. Note that this collection includes line segments, but not unbounded lines. An important specialization of this collection is #$PlaneFigure-Geometrical. The class of all geometric figures, i.e. the class of all abstract, spatial representations. Instance of GeometricFigure are abstract mathematical objects which can be considered as independent of anything in our material universe. They are therefore not MentalObjects, which must be created by people. The instances of this class are GeometricPoints, TwoDimensionalFigures or ThreeDimensionalFigures or any other Object that can be represented as being a distribution of points, lines, planes, volumes, or hypervolumes in some abstract space. be91f0ad-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A CollectiveAgent is a human group or organization, acting as a unit or having some other agent acting in its behalf. OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002 (termed MultiIndividualAgent in Cyc) The collection of all #$Agent-Generics that each consist of other #$Agent-Generics operating together. Usually the constituent agents form some kind of #$Group that itself acts as an #$Agent-Generic. Examples: a #$LegalCorporation, a #$GeographicalAgent, a #$Neighborhood or an #$Industry-Localized. Although it would be a positive exemplar of (#$GroupFn #$Agent), the 'group of people whose first names all start with the letter 'B'' is a negative exemplar of #$MultiIndividualAgent. In almost all contexts, such a group will not act as an #$Agent in any way. It is less cohesive than some of the least cohesive kinds of #$MultiIndividualAgents such as #$CrowdOfPeople. OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002 This collection may be thought of as consisting of all the entities which are localizable within the context of a geography, in the sense that they might plausibly be represented on a map. This includes both #$PartiallyTangible entities like #$GeographicalRegions, and also entities that may be wholly #$Intangible, like territorial borders and boundaries, #$LatitudeLines and #$LongitudeLines, trajectories of missiles and courses of ships, and the #$Equator. A specialization of both #$MultiIndividualAgent and #$GeographicalThing. Each instance of #$GeographicalAgent is a group of people and/or organizations cohesive enough to be treated as an agent (see the collection #$Agent, of which #$GeographicalAgent is a specialization), and which occupies a particular instance of #$GeographicalRegion. Important specializations of #$GeographicalAgent include #$GeopoliticalEntity, #$University, and #$Neighborhood. Note that instances of #$GeographicalAgent are viewed in two significantly different ways with respect to two different types of geography-related microtheories. In a 'physical' geography microtheory (i.e. #$PhysicalGeographyMt and its submicrotheories), geographical agents are clearly distinguished from the regions they occupy. (#$TerritoryFn GEO-AGENT) is used in these contexts to denote the land mass (an instance of #$GeographicalRegion) occupied by a given geographical agent GEO-AGENT. In a 'dualist' geography microtheory (i.e. #$DualistGeopoliticalMt and its submicrotheories), on the other hand, geographical agents are viewed as being _both_ agents _and_ land masses (instances of #$GeographicalRegion). Thus, there is little need for #$TerritoryFn in the latter sort of context. (Despite their somewhat paradoxical flavor, dualist microtheories arguably allow Cyc to mimic commonsense reasoning about geographical agents and regions more closely than do the stricter physical microtheories.) There are also some 'generic' geography microtheories (e.g. #$WorldGeographyMt and #$UnitedStatesGeographyMt) which are neutral with respect to the physical and dualist views. Also see the shared-note for this constant. c1371c02-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 QuantitativeAttributeType is a metatype which is a specialization of the Protege owl:Class that can serve as type for QuantitativeAttributes (length, mass), and an argument restriction for various relations on AttributeType types. This is a primitive mechanism to accommodate OWL limitations on relation arguments. A PhysicalQuantity is a measurable quantity that has a numerical value qualifying a UnitOfMeasure. In one notation, a mass of 25 grams could be expressed as '{25 grams}' where 'grams' is a function that returns a MassMeasure. PhysicalQuantities are measures of attributes of objects in our real world, and as such are subject to uncertainty, also called 'measurement error'. PhysicalQuantity has an attribute of 'MeasurementUncertainty', which is an optional attribute. When a MeasurementUncertainty is not explicitly provided with an instance of PhysicalQuantity, each implementing system has the option to designate default uncertainties, which may be general or specific to particular categories of measurement. COSMO note: PhysicalQuantities in COSMO are categorized both as quantities, and as AttributeValues. Conceptually, to be viewed as an attribute, some combination of AttributeType and AttributeValue would both be involved (e.g. 'a length of 30 cm'). But at this point (v0.3) it does not appear necessary to represent such quantitative attributes in that explicit manner. This issue remains open for possible future elaboration. SUMO: A PhysicalQuantity is a measure of some quantifiable aspect of the modeled world, such as 'the earth's diameter' (a constant length) and 'the stress in a loaded deformable solid' (a measure of stress, which is a function of three spatial coordinates). All PhysicalQuantities are either ConstantQuantities or FunctionQuantities. Instances of ConstantQuantity are dependent on a UnitOfMeasure, while instances of FunctionQuantity are Functions that map instances of ConstantQuantity to other instances of ConstantQuantity (e.g., TimeDependentQuantities are FunctionQuantities). Although the name and definition of PhysicalQuantity is borrowed from physics, PhysicalQuantities need not be material. Aside from the dimensions of length, time, velocity, etc., nonphysical dimensions such as currency are also possible. Accordingly, amounts of money would be instances of PhysicalQuantity. PhysicalQuantities are distinguished from Numbers by the fact that the former are associated with a dimension of measurement. A 'QuantityOfMoney' is any amount of money in any currency. Every PluralThing is a Group consisting of at least two or more entities, considered as one entity, and is related to the component entities by the relation 'hasComponentElement' The name of subtypes of 'PluralThing' in COSMO may take the form of a plural of a count noun. But plurals of count nouns are also used to name 'CommodityProducts', so that usage is not a reliable indicator that a term represents a PluralThing. A 'PluralThing' is an Object, and a 'CommodityProduct' is a substance, so the two are disjoint concepts, in spite of the close relation. The 'CommodityProduct should only be used in the substance sense, and PluralThing for those things who individual members are the focus of representation. NOTE: in COSMO, Group is restricted to groupings of at least one entity, as in OpenCyc. In this manner PluralThing stays closer to the linguistic intuition of a plural. A more generic Group that is not a TemporalThing could be defined, but is left out at this point. NOTE: BFO has the notion of an 'ObjectAggregate' which is similar to a 'PluralThing'; but in BFO the requirements are more stringent than for COSMO 'Group', since a COSMO 'Group' can be composed of arbitarily defined components, whereas in BFO each 'Object' of the aggregate must be an object with perceptible boundaries. Since BFO 'Object' is disjoint from 'fiat object part' and from ObjectAggregate, we need to make 'ObjectAggregate' a subtype of 'PluralThing', and to specify that each component of an 'ObjectAggregate' is a 'WholeObject'. LegalAgent is a Role played in the legal system by some entity - a Person, GroupOfPeople, Organization, or any legal entity recognized as an Agent by some legal system. Each instance of LegalEntity persists only so long as it is involved in some kind of legal transaction; in the case of a contract (e.g. employment) the legal role may persist for some time. Linguistically, the role names and fillers of roles may be used interchangeably, in describing actions, though it is the filler of the role that actually performs the action. The optimal way to represent these intimante relations is not yet decide, but for the present (v0.52), the relation 'hasRoleFiller' must be specified when describing every LegalAgent, so that the actual entity doing the action will be recognized. OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002 A specialization of #$Agent. Each instance of #$LegalAgent is an agent who has some status in a particular legal system. At the very least, such an agent is recognized by some legal authority as having some kinds of rights and/or responsibilities as an agent (e.g., #$citizens of Germany), or as being subject to certain restrictions and penalties (e.g., a company that has been blacklisted by Iraq). Thus, instances of #$LegalAgent include agents that may have property rights, may be taxed, may have a government identification number, may be sued, may have an address, or may buy or sell. Note that membership in this collection is very much dependent upon context. In some societies, only adult males and various kinds of state-run organizations would be included in #$LegalAgent. PhysicalSPaceRegion is a portion of the there-dimensional space of our real world space-time universe. This is considered equialent to\the BFO 'Volume' COSMO Note: SpaceRegion in OpenCyc is not an Object, but pure space. Objects may be located in space. This region is part our our Space-Time This concepts is roughly equivalent to the OpenCyc 'ChunkOfSpace-Empirical', but we allow space regions to be defined by their relation to physical objects - therefore they may not be 'immobile' as the Cyc documentation suggests for 'ChunkOfSpace-Empirical'. For simplicity, the Cyc concept 'SpaceRegion-Empirical' has been merged with this concept, as the distinctions did not seem to have sufficient importance to justify the complexity. BFO: the BFO Type 'SpatialRegion' appears to have the same intent as this Type. The BFo subtypes of Line and Surface appear to be isentical to the subtypes of this Type: SpaceLine-Empirical, SpaceSurface-Empirical, BFO Definition ('SpatialRegion'): A continuant at or in which other continuants can be located. BFO Examples ('SpatialRegion'): the space occupied by an appendix, the space that was occupied by an appendix prior to its removal Cyc comment for 'ChunkOfSpace-Empirical': A specialization of #$SpaceRegion-Empirical, #$ChunkOfSpace, and #$SpatialThing-Localized (qq.v.). Instances of #$ChunkOfSpace-Empirical are three-dimensional portions of the intangible space of the empirically-observable universe. This is the kind of space that physical objects occupy. Cyc comment for 'SpaceRegion-Empirical': A specialization of #$SpaceRegion, #$SpatialThing-Localized, and #$IntangibleExistingThing (qq.v.). Instances of #$SpaceRegion-Empirical are intangible regions of space located in the empirically observable universe. A space region might or might not be connected (see #$SpatiallyContinuousThing). It might be partially or completely filled with (occupied by) #$PartiallyTangibles, or it might be completely empty (but cf. #$EmptySpaceRegion). In any case, the space region itself is not to be confused with a physical object or other spatially localized (non-space-region) thing that might happen to be #$cospatial with it. A given space region can be characterized fully merely by specifying its location and dimensions. Thus (although this is not the case with spatial things in general), space regions are identical (#$equals) if and only if they are #$cospatial. #$SpaceRegion-Empirical is in a way the spatial analogue of #$TimeInterval, whose own instances can be fully characterized by specifying their temporal properties; these two collections can be used, respectively, to talk about space and time as dimensions . Specializations of #$SpaceRegion-Empirical include #$SpacePoint-Empirical, #$SpaceLine-Empirical, #$SpaceSurface-Empirical, and #$ChunkOfSpace-Empirical. OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002 A specialization of #$SpatialThing whose instances are regions of space that exclusively act as locations for other spatial objects, and thus are immobile. Instances of #$SpatialThing are said to occupy some region of space. Three dimensional regions of space [#$ChunkOfSpace] can be occupied by solid objects, see the specialization #$ChunkOfSpace-Empirical for the regions of space occupied by physical objects. Purely two-dimensional objects occupy a #$SpaceSurface, see also #$SpaceLine and #$SpacePoint-Empirical for objects of lower dimension. Note that an object of a given dimension cannot truly be located [#$exactlyLocatedAt-Spatial] at a region of space of lower dimension, but only partially or incidentally. For more information on location and occupancy, see #$AbsoluteLocationalPredicate and its instances that relate objects in space and their regions. An important specialization of #$SpaceRegion is #$SpaceRegion-Empirical, whose instances are pieces of the embedding space where spatio-temporal objects are empirically localizable [#$SpatialThing-Localized]. Note that SpaceRegion in SUMO is an object viewed as a location. Cyc: A specialization of #$PartiallyIntangibleIndividual. Each instance of #$InformationStore is a tangible or intangible, concrete or abstract repository of information. The information stored in an information store is stored there as a consequence of the actions of one or more agents. Wholly intangible instances of #$InformationStore include instances of #$AspatialInformationStore and #$PropositionalInformationThing. Some instances of #$InformationStore - namely, instances of #$InformationBearingObject, such as copies of a newspaper at a newsstand - are only partially intangible. beefff28-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 GenericSubstance[COSMO-added:_not_an_object,_includes_chemicals] List name: GenericSubstance_COSMO-added__not_an_object__includes_chemicals_ COSMO: GenericSubstance is an abstract notion of Substance as the stuff of which objects are composed. It is not an object, even though 'Substance' in OpenCyc and SUMO are actually objects of some particular (homogeneous) composition. In COSMO, we make this provision, among other reasons, to allow abstract 'substances' to compose abstract objects. In COSMO 'Subtance' is a concept that is analogous to the derivative of an object with respect to volume, i.e. it acts like an abstract density (of some substance type). For COSMO version 0.01 (COSMOtopOWL03: 2006-01-01) the required axioms for a proper definition have not been added. For more discussion see: http://colab.cim3.net/file/work/SICoP/ontac/reference/DimensionsOfProcessAndEvent.doc An OrderedGroup is a Group that has some ordering relation between component elements. It usually has more than one component element, but to allow generalization of certain concepts such as an ActionSeries, an OrderedGroup is allowed to have as few as one component element. The ordering may be of any kind: a simple linear order, or a complex multi-dimensional pattern. The most common kind of OrderedGroup is one that is linearly ordered, and each such Group is an instance of the subtype 'LinearlyOrderedGroup'. An OrderedGroup may be physical, whereas a List is an AbstractInformationStore. Therefore not all OrderedGroups are Lists. One may define an OrderedGroup that is a List, if one is careful that the OrderedGroup is also an AbstractInformationStore. Some AttributeValue specific to Organisms. This is very general. Each 'IntensiveAttributeValue' is an AttributeValue that may be qualitative or quantitative, and expresses an intensity of some AttributeType. This is very general. Certain IntensiveAttributeValues may take both verbal intensive values (high'. 'medium', 'low'. and numerical values 'the drug is only 25% effective at preventing cancer'. A QualitativeAttributeValue is the value of some AttributeType which is not expressed in quantitative measures. It can be an attribute of an abstract thing or of a concrete physical object. NOTE that adjectives expressing qualities in English often have a nominalized form: 'Red-Redness' or 'Beautiful-Beauty'. When linguistically to 'have @Att-nom' (@Att-nom is the nominalized form of an attribute) is the same as 'to be @Att' where @Att is the adjectival form, the concept will be represented only once, usually in the adjectival form, and nominalized form needs to be referenced to the adjectival by the linguistic processor. 'Ordered' is an AttributeValue of Groups that have some kind of ordering. More specific orderings will be subtypes of this AttributeValue, such as 'LinearlyOrdered' A transitive relation that allows the ordering of IntensiveAttributeValues, such as 'good' 'so-do' and 'Poor'. Any AttributeType specific to Organisms. 'DegreeOfIntensity' is an AttributeType whose values express some 'IntensiveAttributeValue'. 'Ordered' is an AttributeValue of Groups that have some kind of ordering. More specific orderings will be subtypes of this Attributealue, such as 'LinearlyOrdered' COSMO: A GeopoliticalEntity in COSMO differs from its representation in other ontologies, to stay closer to the linguistic intuitions. Specifically, we say 'government of France', implying that the entity 'France' is not identical to its government. To conform to those intuitions, 'France' and other countries will be GeopoliticalEntities. Therefore a GeopoliticalEntity is something distinct from the organization which forms the government. In COSMO, it is an unusual hybrid, being both a MentalObject and a GenericLocation. Itis neither a PhysicalObject nor an Organization. The Governmen of a GeopoliticalEntity is an Organization. A GeopoliticalEntity in COSMO is a composite Entity which (1) is an agent (2) claims control over some land area of the earth (3) has a government or other ruling organization, which is also an agent (4) is a MentalObject, meaning that it does not have mass and was created by an IntelligentAgent NOTE1: As a GenericLocation, one can say that something isLocatedAt a GeopoliticalEntity even though one means that an object isLocatedAt the region controlled by the GeopoliticalEntity. When an instance of a GeopoliticalEntity is used as an argument that should logically take a region, the implementation should, for consistency, coerce the argument into the corresponding GeopoliticalArea. At present (v0.48) there is no 'disjoint' relation that will cause a logical contradiction, but elaboration of the ontology might cause problems at some point for the use of an Agent as a Location. Alternatives may be worth exploring. NOTE2: if the government performs an action, it is unclear whether it is alway proper to say that a country (or city) performed that action. Therefore the GeopoliticalEntity and its government are treated as distinct agents, though it will probably be true in almost all cases that when one acts, the other can be said to act. NOTE3 that countries have four aspects: (1) the country itself, the GeopoliticalEntity (2) the government of the country (3) the spatial region controlled by the counry (4) the physical objects within the spatial region controlled by the country. (4.1) among the physical objects are those that are part of the land, including the vegetation, and those that are animals or artifactual structures. In normal speech, the distinctions among these are not made because the referents are clear from the context. For this ontology, the distinctions appear necessary. A GeopoliticalEntity usually has an Organization that claims control over the geographical region identified as the area of the GeopoliticalEntity. Usually this will be a government, but occasionally other Organizations such as occupying armies will claim control without claiming to be a formal government. This concept differs from the OpenCyc #$GeopoliticalEntity in that it is strictly an organization, whereas the Cyc concept includes some element of the geographical region itself. The Cyc documentation is reproduced here to clarify the difference: Cyc: A specialization of #$Organization and of #$LegalAgent and of #$GeographicalAgent; instances of this collection control #$GeographicalRegions. Each instance of #$GeopoliticalEntity includes a governing body, but is more than just that governing body. Important subcollections include #$Country, #$IndependentCountry, #$State-Geopolitical, #$City, and #$Province. Instances include #$CityOfTokyoJapan, #$BronxNY-Borough, #$Alaska-State, #$Rwanda, #$Singapore, #$InnerMongolia, #$Somerset-CountyEngland, and #$Taiwan-RepublicOfChina. A central feature of this collection is that geopolitical-entities (indeed, all #$GeographicalAgents) are viewed in two significantly different ways with respect to two different types of geography-related microtheories. In a physical geography microtheory (i.e. #$PhysicalGeographyMt and its submicrotheories), geopolitical-entities are clearly distinguished from the regions they control. (#$TerritoryFn GEO-POL) is used in these contexts to denote the land mass (a #$GeopoliticalRegion) of a given geopolitical-entity GEO-POL. In a dualist geography microtheory (i.e. #$DualistGeopoliticalMt and its submicrotheories), on the other hand, geopolitical-entities are viewed as being _both_ agents _and_ land masses (i.e. #$GeographicalRegions). Thus, there is little need for #$TerritoryFn in the latter sort of context. (Despite their somewhat paradoxical flavor, dualist microtheories arguably allow Cyc to mimic commonsense reasoning about geopolitical entities and regions more closely than do the stricter physicalist microtheories.) There are also some generic geography microtheories (e.g. #$WorldGeographyMt and #$UnitedStatesGeographyMt) which are neutral with respect to the physical and dualist views. Also see the shared-note for this constant. bd58e5da-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A Quantitifier is some numerical or verbal value that specifies or restricts the numerical prefix for a QuantitativeAttributeValue. The simples arre numbers, suc as 3 in the distance measure {3 feet}. A quantifier can also be a range {2 to 4}, such has in{{2 to 4} feet}. A quantifier can also be a number with a variance {3 +- 1}, such has {{3 +- 1} feet}. A quantifier can be verbal, such as 'High', 'Medium' or 'Low' such as {High Intensity}. Quantifiers may have default variances. See: 'hasDefaultVariance' and 'ConfidenceInterval'. A GenericAgent is an aggregate concept representing things that can be linguistically categorized as agents, that is they are the causative subject of an action. One difficulty comes when including Organizations as Agents; Organizations are not actual physical Objects, therefore cannot literally do things to change the physical world. Rather, people who belong to Organizations, or their 'agents' do the actual moving and lifting that are the causes of actions in the real world. Nevertheless we talk of organizations as though they were somehow objects that did the actions themselves. A second problem arises when inanimate objects take the linguistic form of agents: 'The rock broke the window' or 'The knife cut a deep gash in his arm'. By themseles, those sentences would have the rock or the knife as agents, and the window or arm as patients. If more detail were given: "Tom broke the window with a rock'; 'Tom cut a deep gash in Mike's arm with a knife', the agent now shows up as Tom, and the rock and knife are instruments. For that reason, an instrument (a Role) is categorized in COSMO as a subtype of GenericAgent, to accommodate the linguistic structures where instruments take on the synactic/semantic role of an agent. This category is here to provide a place for the linguistic notion of 'Agent' that can include 'social agents' such as organizations. In this classification we adopt a broad view of agents, allowing inanimate things like hurricanes and tornadoes to be classified as AgentiveObjects. An Artifact-Generic was anything created by an Agent. More useful categories will be the more specific Types. Original COSMO Indented List name: Artifact-Generic_includes_conceptual_works__laws__information_objects_ OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002 A collection of things created by #$Agents. These creations may be either tangible (like a hammer, a bowl, or a bridge) or intangible (like a set of laws, a #$KnowledgeBase, or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony). Thus, the collection of #$Artifact-Generics is partitioned into #$Artifact and #$Artifact-Intangible (q.v.). A MentalObject is an Object that does not have mass and was created by an IntelligentAgent (usually a Person.or Organization). This is a very broad and primitive category comprehensible mostly by inspection of a list of subtypes. Since this is not physical, instances of this Type are not observable, but physical representations of instances of this Type (such as a specific copy of 'Gone With the Wind') can be weighed and felt. Abstract texts, musical compositions, propositions, theories, plays, poems, speeches, rights - all are MentalObjects. They will invariably have a physical representation in some PhysicalObject (including brains, light waves and sound waves). But the MentalObject itself has no physical (material) component. This corresponds closely to what in some systems (e.g. the Ontology Works top ontology) is called an 'AbstractArtifact' - something created by a Person that is not a PhysicalObject. We adopt the convention that an individual MentalObject exists only so long as there is some PhysicalObject that represents it. That PhysicalObject could be the brain of a Person, some sound or electromagnetic waves encoding that MentalObject, or some piece of paper with markings on it. When the last physical object representing that MentalObject ceases to exist, that MentalObject also ceases to exist. A new MentalObject indistinguishable from a previously existing one can always be created (even by the original creator), but it would be a different individual with a different identity. NOTE that a MentalObject is a subtype of 'AbstractEntity', but we adopt the convention that it can hava a location in space-time, being the collection of locations where its physical representations are located. Thus a Belief or a Proposition may be located in the brain of one or more IntelligentAgents, or in physical documents describing the belief symbolically. This 'location' differs from the location of any individual physical object, because the location is the collection of all physical objects containing representations of the Mental Object. This notion of 'abstract' is not the same as the traditional 'abstract' which cannot be located in space-time. Other subtypes of 'AbstractEntity' such as MathematicalObjects will be more traditionally abstract in that way. An idiosyncratic 'location' for a MentalObject is the location of a GeopoliticalEntity, which is located in the region controlled by the GeopoliticalEntity. Equivalent to the Cyc #$Artifact-Intangible OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002: A specialization of both #$IntangibleIndividual and #$Artifact-Generic. Each instance of #$Artifact-Intangible is an intangible thing intentionally created by an agent or agents. Important specializations of #$Artifact-Intangible include #$ComputerLanguage, #$ConceptualWork, and #$Agreement. COSMO: An InformationObject is a MentalObject created by an IntelligentAgent that contains Information in some form. The name 'Information-object' is from DOLCE. Comparable to the OpenCyc '#$AbstractInformationalThing'. This subsumes both the symbolic objects that people may create as well as the yet more abstract informational content ('propositional content') which may be viewed as existing independent of the symbols used to encode it. 'Information' has not been well defined yet, so this category does not have clear defining conditions of its own, but subsumes things like AbstractSymbolicObjects, Propositions, and Languages. Every Communication transfers some InformationObject. DOLCE; Information objects are social objects. They are realized by some entity. They are ordered (expressed according to) by some system for information encoding. Consequently, they are dependent from an encoding as well as from a concrete realization.They can express a description (the ontological equivalent of a meaning/conceptualization), can be about any entity, and can be interpreted by an agent.From a communication perspective, an information object can play the role of 'message'. From a semiotic perspective, it plays the role of 'expression'. OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002\nA heterogeneous collection of abstract objects that pertain to information. Subsumes not only #$Proposition, but also the collections #$Sentence, #$CharacterString, #$AtomicSymbol-Abstract, #$Microtheory, #$PropositionalInformationThing, and #$ConceptualWork. Note that while all #$AbstractInformationalThings are abstract objects (this collection is disjoint with #$SpatialThing-Localized), most instances of this collection can have multiple concrete 'embodiments';. A single instance of #$Sentence can be written on several peices of paper (see #$instantiationOfAIS); a #$PropositionalInformationThing may be the content of several concrete documents, such as instances of #$BookCopy (see #$containsInfoPropositional-IBT); and several events, such as spoken utterances, may have a certain #$Proposition as their content (see #$containsInformation). Note that some instances of #$AbstractInformationalThing have temporal extent. Examples include all instances of #$Novel-CW and #$Movie-CW. Others specs are disjoint with #$TemporalThing. Examples include all instances of #$Character-Abstract and #$Proposition. A AbstractSymbolicObject is a mental object which is created to serve as a Symbol, i.e. to represent something other than itself. This is not a physical object, but more abstract, such as the letter 'a', which may have representations in billions of different physical objects, but retains its identity as the unique (Roman alphabet) letter 'a'. Every SymbolicObject is represented in at least one PhysicalObject, even if only the brain of the person who created it. The more interesting SymbolicObjects are texts and documents. This Type is approximately equal to,and merged with, the Cyc 'AbstractInformationStructure' From Cyc: OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002\ A subcollection of #$AbstractInformationalThing whose instances involve symbols standing in certain relations to one another. Important specializations include #$CharacterString and #$Sentence. #$AbstractInformationStructure also includes abstract diagrams, graphs, and bit strings. The collection can be more precisely defined as follows: Each #$AbstractInformationStructure is such that each of its physical instantiations (see #$instantiationOfAIS) consists of instantiations of instances of #$AtomicSymbol-Abstract, arranged in a certain way. For example, the abstract sentence 'The pig flies' is an #$AbstractInformationStructure. Each written instantiation of it consists of an instantiation of the words (symbols) 'The', 'pig' and 'flies', written in that order. (If the #$AbstractInformationStructure 'The pig flies' were spoken, the same words would appear in the same order, i.e. 'The' first, etc., but the sequence would be determined by the arrangement of the words in time, rather than space.) Likewise with abstract diagrams, graphs, etc. Each of these is such that their physical instantiations consist of arrangements of instantiations of instances of #$AtomicSymbol-Abstract. A hard copy of a wiring diagram consists of a group of concrete symbols representing various circuit components, in which these symbols are spatially arranged in a certain in way. The arrangement of the concrete symbols in an instantiation of an #$AbstractInformationStructure is not always a simple matter of arrangement in space or time. The sequence of symbols '0010010111011001' can be instantiated in written, spoken, or electronic forms. In the last case, the order of the symbols is determined by conventions concerning the electronic medium in which it is stored, rather than by any common criterion for precedence or subsequence in space or time. Cyc term: 'AspatialInformationStore' Cyc: A specialization of #$AspatialThing, #$IntangibleIndividual, and #$InformationStore. #$AspatialInformationStore is the collection of all information stores that have no spatial location. Specializations of #$AspatialInformationStore include #$ConceptualWork, #$Microtheory, #$AbstractInformationStructure, and #$FieldOfStudy. Although no instance of #$AspatialInformationStore has a spatial location, some instances can have multiple spatio-temporal embodiments . For example, an instance of #$PropositionalInformationThing may be the content of several concrete documents, such as several instances of #$BookCopy (see #$containsInfoPropositional-IBT); and several distinct events, such as spoken utterances, may have a certain unique #$Proposition as their content (see #$containsInformation). bdff6c64-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 COSMO note: in COSMO this type is abstract and does not include physical objects. Cyc: A specialization of both #$InformationStore and #$PartiallyIntangibleIndividual. Each instance of #$StructuredInformationSource is an #$InformationStore in which bits of information are represented as related in a systematic way that is easily characterized by some type of formal structure, including spatial or architectural terms (used metaphorically). Examples include: a database organized in fields and values; a spreadsheet organized in rows and columns with entries; an organizational tree diagram with nodes and branches; a topographical map; a document written in HTML (hyper-text markup language). Negative examples include computer programs, poems, and novels. AttributeTypeType is a metatype which is a specialization of the Protege owl:Class that can serve as type for AttributeTypes (length, mass), and an argument restriction for various relations on AttributeType types. This is a primitive mechanism to accommodate OWL limitations on relation arguments. a metatype that can be used as an argument restriction for relations that take a subtype of Agent as one of their arguments. All Organisms, plant, animal, microorganism, are of AgentType. MeasurableQuantityType is a metatype which is a specialization of the Protege owl:Class that can serve as type for MeasurableQuantities, whether abstract or physical, and an argument restriction for various relations on MeasurableQuantity types. This is a primitive mechanism to accommodate OWL limitations on relation arguments. ShapeType is a metatype which is a specialization of the Protege owl:Class that can serve as type for shape attributes and an argument restriction for the hasShape relation. This is a primitive mechanism to accommodate OWL limitations. NOTE: as of v0.50, both shape attributes and specifically shaped objects can be instances of ShapeType. @ToDo - this should probably be differentiated. a metatype that can be used as an argument restriction for relations that take an instance of Pattern as one of their arguments. A subcollection of #$SpatialThing. Each instance of #$GeometricallyDescribableThing is a spatially-connected spatial thing (of 0, 1, 2, or 3 dimensions) that either (i) has or approximates a simple geometric shape (e.g. it is a #$Line or a #$Hemisphere) or (ii) consists of a number of (connected) parts in a relatively stable geometric configuration, where each such part has or approximates a simple geometric shape (e.g. a table consisting of a 3-D-disc-shaped top and four cylindrical legs). A #$GeometricallyDescribableThing might be tangible (see #$PhysicalObject) or intangible (see #$GeometricallyDescribableThing-Intangible). Note that what counts as approximating a given simple geometric shape -- and thus what spatial things count as #$GeometricallyDescribableThings - varies with context. In a context that was so fine-grained shape-wise that even the shapes of the individual molecules on the surface of an object were considered relevant to the object's shape, perhaps nearly every (connected, solid) tangible object would be geometrically-describable. In more everyday contexts, on the other hand, an unopened can of soup would be geometrically-describable (as a cylinder), while a telephone or an animal's body would probably not. bd58c42e-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A specialization of both #$GeometricallyDescribableThing and #$IntangibleIndividual (qq.v.). This is the collection of all intangible, geometrically-describable things, whether spatially localized or not. #$GeometricallyDescribableThing-Intangible is the intersection (see #$collectionIntersection) of #$GeometricallyDescribableThing and #$Intangible. Examples include any spatially-connected, intangible thing that has or approximates (or which consists entirely of parts that all have or approximate) a simple geometric shape, such as the intangible space determined by a particular Egyptian pyramid, an abstract Platonic sphere, or the center of mass of the solar system (a point) at the first instant of the Twentieth Century in Greenwich, England. Important specializations of this collection are #$GeometricThing-Localized (which includes all spatially localized instances) and #$GeometricThing-Abstract (which includes all instances not spatially located in the empirically-observable universe). c12c73ef-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A specialization of #$TwoOrHigherDimensionalThing and #$SpaceRegionLimit. This is the collection of all surfaces, tangible or intangible (see #$Surface-Physical and #$Surface-Intangible), of spatial things. Each instance of #$Surface-Generic is a spatial thing that has extent in at least two dimensions, and either has no thickness (i.e. is a purely two-dimensional object) or has an insignificant thickness compared to its length and width. (If it is a closed surface, e.g. an apple skin, then any significant subregion of it must have insignificant thickness compared to that subregion's length and width.) Thus a surface might be two- or three-dimensional; tangible or intangible; spatially connected or not; it might be flat, curved, folded, or crumpled. Other examples of surfaces are the skin of a basketball, the face-up side of a table top, and a particular face of an abstract cube. Other specializations of #$Surface-Generic are #$FlatSurface, #$Surface-Closed, and #$Surface-Open. A specialization of #$Surface-Generic (q.v.).This is the collection of open surfaces of (tangible or intangible) spatial objects. Each instance of #$Surface-Open has some boundary, such as an edge, perimeter, or hole. Examples include the top surface of a tabletop, the surface of a whiffle ball, a slightly cracked eggshell, and the skin of an apple with a bite taken from it. Non-examples are a basketball skin and an intact eggshell; cf. #$Surface-Closed. Note that 'hole' here is intended in its colloquial, human-scale sense, according to which (e.g.) a wiffle ball has holes but a baseball does not (even though at some fine-grained level the latter does have tiny holes). bd8cb302-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 GeographicalRegion_Cyc-includes_other_planets In COSMO, this type includes any region on or near the surface of a planet, including the region that contains its atmosphere. But the usage here differs from that in Cyc, and this category is not a physical object. For physical objects at the surface of a planet, see 'PlanetarySurfaceObject'. Cyc comment: A specialization of #$GeographicalThing and #$Surface-Physical. Each instance of #$GeographicalRegion is a tangible spatial region that includes some piece of the surface of a planet (usually #$PlanetEarth), and may be represented on a map of the planet. This includes purely topographical regions like mountains and underwater spaces, places defined by demographics (e.g., language areas) and territory otherwise demarcated (e.g. #$TimeZones). In dualist geopolitical contexts [see #$DualistGeopoliticalMt], instances of #$GeopoliticalEntity are also considered to be instances of #$GeographicalRegion. In all cases the region in question must contain some tangible component with which it is possible to make physical contact. The instances of #$GeographicalRegion contrast in this respect with the instances of #$GeographicalThing-Intangible, which are wholly intangible. Examples of #$GeographicalRegion include #$RockyMountainStates-USRegion, the #$ContinentOfAustralia, #$SinaiPeninsula, and - in dualist geopolitical contexts - #$YaleUniversity and #$CityOfPittsburghPA. Some important types of regions are represented by the sub-collections #$LanguageArea, #$TimeZone, #$PostalCodeRegion, #$EcologicalRegion, #$ConstructionSite, and - in dualist geopolitical contexts -- #$GeopoliticalEntity. No instances of #$GeographicalRegion are wholly indoor locations. GeographicalRegion[Cyc-includes_other_planets] 'Individual' is a Cyc concept used to distinguish abstract sets and collections (classes) from things that are individuals. Interestingly, groups of things can be individuals - if they are defined as distinct from sets (see 'Group'). This class may be superfluous, but in COSMO is a convenient catch-all for some aggregate Types that would merely serve to clutter the top level and obscure the structure of the ontology if exposed at the top level directly under 'Thing'. Conversely, Some of the subtypes of the Cyc 'individual' have also been subclassed directly to 'owl:Thing' to expose those common concepts at the highest level, to make the structure of the ontology easier to see. NOTE that some of the concepts mentioned in the Cyc documnentation differ significantly in COSMO from related concepts in Cyc. But the Cyc documentation is given here to describe how the similar Cyc notion of Group is described in that ontology. From OpenCyc: OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002 #$Individual is the collection of all individuals: things that are _not_ sets or collections. Individuals might be concrete or abstract, and include (among other things) physical objects, events, numbers, relations, and groups. An instance of #$Individual might have parts or structure (including discontinuous parts); but _no_ individual has elements or subsets (see #$elementOf and #$subsetOf). Thus, an individual that has parts (e.g. #$physicalParts or #$groupMembers) is _not_ the same thing as either the set or the collection containing those same parts. For example, your car is an individual, but the collection of all the parts of your car is not an individual but an instance of #$Collection. This collection (unlike the car itself) is abstract: it doesn't have a location, mass, or a top speed; but it does have instances, subcollections, and supercollections. In partial contrast, the #$Group (q.v.) of parts of your car (while also not the same thing as the car itself) _is_ an individual that has location and mass. Another example: A given company, the group consisting of all the company's employees, the collection of those employees, and the set of those employees are four distinct things, and only the first two are individuals. NOTE that OpenCyc spatialThing does not necessarily have to be in our Space-Time; it can be in an abstract space. So this is not identical to DOLCE 'spatio-temporal-particular', which is a subclass. OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002 The collection of all things that have a spatial extent or location relative to some other #$SpatialThing or in some embedding space. Note that to say that an entity is a member of this collection is to remain agnostic about two issues. First, a #$SpatialThing may be #$PartiallyTangible (e.g. #$Texas-State) or wholly #$Intangible (e.g. #$ArcticCircle or a line mentioned in a geometric theorem). Second, although we do insist on location relative to another spatial thing or in some embedding space, a #$SpatialThing might or might not be located in the actual physical universe. It is far from clear that all #$SpatialThings are so located: an ideal platonic circle or a trajectory through the phase space of some physical system (e.g.) might not be. If the intent is to imply location in the empirically observable cosmos, the user should employ this collection's specialization, #$SpatialThing-Localized. A #$SpatialThingTypeByDimensionality and a specialization of #$SpatialThing, each instance of which is either a one- or two- or three- (or higher-) dimensional spatial object. Examples include tangible or intangible spatially-localized dimensional objects, such as the edge of a tabletop, the surface of the tabletop, and the table itself, as well as abstract geometrical objects that are at least one-dimensional, such as a Platonic circle or cube. Specializations of this collection include #$ExtendedSpaceRegion, #$ShapedThing, and #$TwoOrHigherDimensionalThing. A #$SpatialThingTypeByDimensionality and a specialization of #$SpatialThing, each instance of which is either a two- or three- (or higher-) dimensional spatial object. Examples include tangible or intangible spatially-localized polydimensional objects, such as the flat surface of a tabletop and the table itself, as well as abstract geometrical objects that are at least two-dimensional, such as a Platonic cube. Specializations of this collection include #$PartiallyTangible, #$BilateralObject, and #$TwoDimensionalGeometricThing. COSMO Note: note that Cyc SpatialThing does not have to be in our space-time, whereas DOLCE spatio-temporal-particular is. So the DOLCE class is a subclass of the Cyc class. OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002 The collection of all things that have a spatial extent or location relative to some other #$SpatialThing or in some embedding space. Note that to say that an entity is a member of this collection is to remain agnostic about two issues. First, a #$SpatialThing may be #$PartiallyTangible (e.g. #$Texas-State) or wholly #$Intangible (e.g. #$ArcticCircle or a line mentioned in a geometric theorem). Second, although we do insist on location relative to another spatial thing or in some embedding space, a #$SpatialThing might or might not be located in the actual physical universe. It is far from clear that all #$SpatialThings are so located: an ideal platonic circle or a trajectory through the phase space of some physical system (e.g.) might not be. If the intent is to imply location in the empirically observable cosmos, the user should employ this collection's specialization, #$SpatialThing-Localized. Note that most of the Cyc 'SpatialThings' are in our universe (though not necessarily), so most are also under DOLCE 'spatio-temporal-particular'. DOLCE: Dummy class for optimizing some property universes. It includes all entities that are not reifications of universals ('abstracts'), i.e. those entities that are in space-time. spatio-temporal-particular[DOLCE]%SpatialThing Each GeographicalRegion is a connected one-,two- or three-dimensional region of space located on or near the surface of some astronomical body, not necessarily the Earth. For 3-dimensonal regions specifically on the Earth, use 'GeographicalArea'. It is understood that the regions defined are stationary with respect to some coordinate system in which the astronomical object itself is considered to be stationary. The astronomical object itself (most commonly the Earth) will of course be rotating and moving through space, and those motions are ignored when the relative locations defined by 'GeographicalRegion' are used. A GeographicalRegion will include some portion of the space above the solid material that defines the region, and below the surface; at this point (v 0.44) we have not precisely specified how much of the space above or below the surface is included. COSMO note: this Cyc category is reinterpreted as representing only spatial regions - points, areas, or volumes, on or near the surface of some planetary body (to clearly specify the Earth, use the subtype 'GeographicalArea'), but this does not represent any of the physical objects that might exist in that region. The discussion of 'tangible' in the Cyc documentation below suggests the inclusion of physical objects, but that is not the intent of this COSMO cateegory. Though this category does not include any physical objects, one may use 'GeographicalObject' to specify all of the objects in any GeographicalRegion, if desired. Cyc: A specialization of #$GeographicalThing and #$Surface-Physical. Each instance of #$GeographicalRegion is a tangible spatial region that includes some piece of the surface of a planet (usually #$PlanetEarth), and may be represented on a map of the planet. This includes purely topographical regions like mountains and underwater spaces, places defined by demographics (e.g., language areas) and territory otherwise demarcated (e.g. #$TimeZones). In dualist geopolitical contexts [see #$DualistGeopoliticalMt], instances of #$GeopoliticalEntity are also considered to be instances of #$GeographicalRegion. In all cases the region in question must contain some tangible component with which it is possible to make physical contact. The instances of #$GeographicalRegion contrast in this respect with the instances of #$GeographicalThing-Intangible, which are wholly intangible. Examples of #$GeographicalRegion include #$RockyMountainStates-USRegion, the #$ContinentOfAustralia, #$SinaiPeninsula, and - in dualist geopolitical contexts - #$YaleUniversity and #$CityOfPittsburghPA. Some important types of regions are represented by the sub-collections #$LanguageArea, #$TimeZone, #$PostalCodeRegion, #$EcologicalRegion, #$ConstructionSite, and - in dualist geopolitical contexts -- #$GeopoliticalEntity. No instances of #$GeographicalRegion are wholly indoor locations.. Role is a high-level concept that aggregates several primitive notions, and is difficult to describe analytically, but has a necessary property that, as a subtype of TemporalThing, every instance has a beginning time and an ending time. For Roles that are created by an Event and last forever, (The Father of PrinceWilliam), the ending time can be TheEndOfTime. For case roles in a specific Event, the Role lasts no longer than the duration of the Event (but may last for less than that time, for participants who participate only for part of an Event). The most common use of 'Role' is for concepts that exist in dependence on other concepts, such as 'Mother', which implies a child, or 'President' which implies some organization. But grammatical roles such as the cases of verb case frames will also fit under this broad category. When a phrase such as 'The ?X of ?Y' is encountered, almost invariably the ?X is a Role of some kind, which also includes parts. In COSMO 'Role' is broad enough to include Events; for example, 'Choice' is a Role, and some Events may fill the Role of 'Choice' - those thing a Person chooses to do. NOTE importantly: that HumanRole is a subtype of this category, and also a subtype of Person, so Person and Role are not disjoint. This allows HumanRoles (janitor, President) to serve in the same relations that people themselves would serve, but they are also recognizable as Roles because they will be subtypes of the Role category. The mathematical and logical 'equals' can be used to equate a unique Role with its filler, but only if the time interval during which that relation hodls is specified. In that case, the Role and its filler can be used interchangeably, but only in the base 'all-knowing' context NOTE that Roles may not be 'transparent' in referential contexts asserting beliefs or possible worlds. A person who does not know the filler of a Role may express opinions about the Role, which are inconsistent with their opinions about the filler of the Role. For example, a man who loves his wife may assert that he hates the murderer of a friend, not knowing that his wife is the murderer of his friend. If the Role and role filler were asserted to be mathematically identical in all contexts, this would entail a contradiction, assuming that love and hate are disjoint for this example. An individual assertion by a Person needs to be treated as a part of a belief system. NOTE also that when used as a pure OWL ontology, it will be necessary for every subclass of Role should to be an instance of RoleType, so that it can be used as an argument for the relation 'isServingInTheRoleOf'. If, in other formats, this condition is not explicit, the translation should add the Type when converting into OWL format. For Roles that are merged with other Types, such as HumanRoles, each should have its own explicit relation indicating when the role-filler started in that role and when (it/he/she) ended. If it is possible to fill a Role for multiple non-continguous periods of time, then the begin and end time of each continuous segment of 'Role' will define individual instances of that Role; as a reault, the relation 'isServingInTheRoleOf' cannot be functional. NOTE also that the use of 'Role" in the COSMO is still being developed, and is likely to be seen to be inconsistent in application (though not logically inconsistent) as of v 0.49. The issue not yet resolved is whether the subtypes of 'Role' as here used would be better categorized as 'playing a role' rather than 'being a role'. Although this quasi-philosophical issue is not yet clear, this vagueness does not appear to cause any logical inconsistencies in usage. COSMO: a three-dimensional region of some space (not necessarily our real world space). This is the space itself, and does not include or immply that ther are any objects in it. However, each instance of this kind fo space will usually be interpreted relative to some defined cooridinate system, which, in the ral world, usually means that it is relative to some physical object (which could be the collecion of all object in the universe as a whole, to provide a universal frame of revernce). In Cyc called 'ChunkOfSpace'. Cyc: A specialization of both #$ExtendedSpaceRegion and #$TwoOrHigherDimensionalThing (qq.v.). Instances of #$ChunkOfSpace are three-dimensional portions of a three-dimensional space. This is the kind of place that solid (i.e. three-dimensional) objects occupy. It makes sense to speak of, or compute, the volume of such objects. An important specialization of this collection is #$ChunkOfSpace-Empirical, whose instances are pieces of space in the empirical universe - the kind of space that physical objects occupy. be669a01-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 COSMO note: Place can be a PhysicalObject or a Region. This category is very generic. Cyc: A specialization of #$EnduringThing-Localized. Each instance of #$Place is a spatial thing which has a relatively permanent location. Thus, in a given microtheory, each #$Place is stationary with respect to the frame of reference of that microtheory. bd58d3b4-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 COSMO note: this type appears to be intended to represent humans and human groups, so it is placed as a subtype of 'IntelligentAgent'. DOLCE only: 'agentive-social-object' A social object that is assumed to internally represent a plan. Since social objects are dependent on physical ones, it is not trivial to interpret the local sense in which a social object 'internally represents' a plan. For example, an institution can have the plan to promote or regulate some activities, but this is possible by means of the powers conferred to it by some legal system, through its representatives, and that plan has to be executed by means of the physical agents that 'act for' the institution. A SpatialRegion can be of any dimension, though the ones of most interest are three-dimensional in our real world. All Regions must have their location referenced to some definable object, whether abstract or physical. In theory, it may be possible to consider the whole universe as an Object and define 'absolute' regions based on locations in the whole universe, but that may not be useful for any practical purpose. The regions of greatest interest to people are regions defined relative to the Earth's surface, which forms a moving rotating frame of reference, which we treat as stationary for most purposes. NOTE: The BFO 'SpatialRegion' is closest to the COSMO 'PhysicalSpaceRegion' which is a subtype of this Type. An EvaluativeAttribute is a QualitativeAttributeValue for some entity, concrete or abstract, that reflects the judgment of an IntelligentAgent regarding that entity. the judgment may be objective or subjective, but will be relative to some purpose. The property of substances or objects that are considered (by their possesor or potential possessor) to have some positive value. isTheOppositeOf relates one attribute to another attribute that would be commonly considered the opposite of the first attribute. There is a hub-and-spoke structure to certain core attributes and related attribute, and the notion of 'opposite' is in many cases more lexical than conceptual. This relation tries to capture the common cases of opposites. The property of substances or objects that are considered (by their possesor) to have no positive value. hasQualitativeAttribute relates individual Objects or substances to some qualitative attribute (a subclass of QualitativeAttributeValue) that the object has. The accurate use of this property for substances is difficult to express in OWL. Since Substances are classes, to describe a qualitative attribute of a substance, in OWL one would need a metatype specifically for each substance, which multiplies reified entities unnecessarily. A FOL rule would be easy to construct to correctly relate the substances to their properties, but for COSMO version 0.2 a work-around for such a rule is not yet on hand. The restrictions on substances should be interpreted as meaning necessary conditions on all subclasses of the substances. Anything that has value to a cognitive agent. The value does not have to be monetary, it can be sentimental. The thing can be an object, a right, a substance, or something intangible such as friendship or knowledge. Anything that would cause distress to an agent if it were lost is a valuable thing. Anything that can be used to help an agent achieve desired goals (e.g. food) is also a valuable thing - see the subtype 'Resource'. Anything that an intelligent agent would pay money to obtain is a valuable thing; in this case, the 'value' is at least approximately quantifiable. Artifact* COSMO note: this class was merged with the Cyc 'Artifact-HumanCreated' because little difference could be discerned. Most instances of Artifact will be created by humans - people, groups, organizations, or their automaton servants. Artifactual objects created by non-humans (e.g. animals) will also be instances of ArtifactObject (e.g. 'SpiderWeb').. Artifact( Cyc and SUMO); material-artifact(DOLCE) SUMO: A CorpuscularObject that is the product of a Making. Cyc comment for ;Artifact-HumanCreated': A collection of individual #$Artifacts. Each instance of #$Artifact-HumanCreated is a tangible thing made by an instance of #$HomoSapiens, or by a (#$GroupFn #$HomoSapiens). Examples include instances of #$Clothing-Generic, #$Automobile, #$DrainageCanal, and #$HydroelectricDam. OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002 A specialization of #$InanimateThing. Each instance of #$Artifact is an at least partially tangible thing which was intentionally created by an #$Agent (or a group of #$Agents working together) to serve some purpose or perform some function. In order to create an instance of #$Artifact, it is not necessary that an #$Agent create the matter out of which the #$Artifact is composed; rather, an #$Agent can create an instance of #$Artifact by assembling or modifying existing matter. Examples of #$Artifacts include a wooden flute that's been whittled from a tree branch, a sawhorse that's been put together out of boards and nails, and a coin that's been minted by embossing or by melting liquid silver into a mold. In addition to the obvious human artifacts (buildings, tools, textiles, power lines), the collection #$Artifact also includes certain sorts of things made by #$Animals, such as bird nests, termite mounds, and beaver dams. Artifacts without any tangible parts are excluded from the collection #$Artifact; they are included in the collection #$Artifact-Intangible. DOLCE: material-artifact: No easy definition of artifactual properties is possible, hence it is better to rely on alternative descriptions and roles: a physical object that shows or is known to have an artifactual origin that counts in the tasks an ontology is supposed to support, will be a material artifact. On the other hand, physical objects that do not show that origin, or that origin is unimportant for the task of the ontology, will be physical bodies. Formally, a restriction is provided here that requires that the collection whose members are (at least some of the) proper parts of a material artifact is *unified* by a plan or project. An instance of #$ObjectType, and a specialization of #$Artifact-Generic. #$Artifact-NonAgentive is the collection of all artifacts that are _not_ agents (i.e., that are _not_ instances of #$Agent-Generic). Specializations of #$Artifact-NonAgentive include #$Bicycle, #$Pants, #$Canal, and #$FoodUtensil. COSMO note: Artifacts are not Agentive in the sense that they are not IntentionalAgents (they can't speak or fporm plans). However, in COSMO an Instrument is an instance of GenericAgent, so the name must not be interpreted as meaning that an Artifact-NonAgentive is not a GenericAgent. Agent-Generic[Cyc]%Agent[DOLCE]%SentientAgent[SUMO] An IntentionalAgent is an Agent that (typically) has the capacity to form a plan of action. Therefore an IntentionalAgent is an Agent to whom some purpose may be assigned - even if only the purpose of survival. The level of intentionality required to belong to this category is not as high as that required to belong to the more specific category of 'IntelligentAgent'. Therefore computer programs that do not approach human-level linguistic capacity, but have some level of intentionality (in this ontology 'SoftwareAgents') will fit in this category. But to belong to this category a comouter program must have a high degree of autonomy - it must be able to reason about situations and form plans that were not directly preprogrammed. As of 2008 it is uncertain whether any such programs exist. @ToDo: NOTE that an IntentionalAgent does not necessarily have to be a PhysicalObject (as of v0.52) because the subtype SoftwareAgent is not a PhysicalObject, and sprits that in religion or folklore have agentive powers are also not PhysicalObjects.. IntentionalAgent is disjoint from Artifact-NonAgentive. This category will also include some non-human animals that can be said to be able to form some plans, however primitive. As of COSMO version 0.3, we include only mammals under this class. If it is shown that other animals can form primitive plans, at that time they may also be added as subtypes of this category. OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002 #$Agent-Generic is the collection of all agents, or things (like #$Animals, #$Robots, #$DivineBeings, etc.) that have desires and intentions and the presumed ability to act on them. An instance of this collection may be an instance of #$AgentiveArtifact or #$Agent (but not both). In SUMO, 'CognitiveAgent' appears to be the approximate equivalent. SUMO: An Agent that has rights but may or may not have responsibilities and the ability to reason. If the latter are present, then the Agent is also an instance of CognitiveAgent. Domesticated animals are an example of SentientAgents that are not also CognitiveAgents. DOLCE: agent: A catch-all class used to join agentive objects (either physical or social). Agents are dispositionally so, in the sense that they internally represent descriptions, and in particular plans, goals and possible actions, but they do not necessarily act. In everyday language, agent is used in this sense, but also to tell that something has acted in a certain way, or to say that something has an initiator or leading role in some action. In DLP, the performs relation encodes these notions. An IntelligentAgent is an agent (Person, Organization, GroupOfPeople, or possibly spirits or an intelligent machine) that can form plans, use knowledge in plans, and can communicate in language. Some activities, such as buying things, can only be performed by an IntelligentAgent. Among the natural animals, only people qualify for this status - in this respect, this category differs from the definition given by Cyc (below). Groups of people, or organizations whose acts are in fact carried out by people (or machines directed by people), can be considered as IntelligentAgents - by the convention that the acts carried out by people who are authorized to act in the name of an organization are acts of the organization. (see Organization). To some degree, existing or future computers may also have such a capacity, and would fit into this category, even if the range of linguistic inputs that would generate an appropriate response may be much more limited than for an adult human;'intelligence' is therefore a quantitative attribute, which has a range of values. NOTE that this category needs to be carefully axiomatized so that the system will recognize blocking conditions that may prevent the understanding of language in specific circumstances: for example, an individual person will only understand one or a small number of languages; a person will understand language only when conscious and awake, and able to perceive the input. A human baby will not understand language at birth, and will develop that capacity gradually; nevertheless a human baby is an instance of this Type. Implementing the use of such blocking conditions will be complex, but including any agent type that can normally understand some human or near-human language appears to be preferable to creating a subtype of human that can qualify absolutely as understanding language, without conditions. NOTE that a Person is an IntelligentAgent, and therefore a DeadPerson is also an IntelligentAgent. In most circumstances, one would not consider a DeadPerson as being able to understand language, unless one is within a belief system where spirits sruvive bodily death. Death is one of the potential blocking conditions for language understanding that will need to be interpreted in context. NOTE that as of 2008, there were no machines that acted on their own behalf, and any action taken by a machine is to be attributed to the agency of the person, organizaton, or GroupOfpeople who directed that machine to act. This is similar to the Cyc #$IntelligentAgent,but excludes non-human animals: From Cyc: A specialization of #$Agent-Generic (q.v.) whose instances are all agents capable of knowing and acting, and of employing their knowledge in their actions. An intelligent agent #$knowsAbout certain things, and having #$beliefs (and possibly #$goals) concerning those things may influence its actions. As with agents generally, an intelligent agent might be a single individual or might consist of a group of individual agents (see #$MultiIndividualAgent). Thus persons are intelligent agents, and so are certain social beings like business and government organizations. Some non-human instances of #$Vertebrate that seem to be sentient and somewhat intelligent, such as (arguably) dogs and horses, can also be considered intelligent agents. BFO Definition: An occurrent at or in which processual entities can be located. COSMO note: this concept in COSMO is very generic,a nd can be used to specify a spatiotemporal region of any shape. To specify a spatiotemporal region of a more defined shape, use 'TimeAndPlace', for which the spatial shape of the region will depend on the 'location' component of the instance defined. BFO Examples: the spatiotemporal region occupied by a human life, the spatiotemporal region occupied by the development of a cancer tumor, the spatiotemporal context occupied by a process of cellular meiosis spatiotemporal_region A specialization of #$IntelligentAgent. Each instance of #$SocialBeing is an intelligent agent whose status as an agent is acknowledged within some social system, and who is capable of playing certain social roles within that system. Note that in many (but not all) cases, a #$SocialBeing will have certain rights and responsibilities associated with his/her/its status within the relevant social system. For agents who are granted rights and responsibilities under some legal system, see the specialization #$LegalAgent. Other notable specializations of #$SocialBeing are #$Person and #$Organization. bd58a49e-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A #$Place or area with clustered or scattered buildings and a permanent human population, including cities, settlements, towns, and villages. It does not include #$Locales. NOTE that this is a subtype of PhysicalSpaceRegion and is disjoint with Agent. This is a synonym for 'Settlement': 'Settlement' is a very general concept of some area that has people residing in it, the people in it recognizing the area as having an identity distinct from that of other areas. It can be very small or very large. This is similar to the notion of "Populated Place" used in geographical Databases. OCM thesaurus: the topic of 'Settlements' is described: General statements covering several specific aspects of the physical configuration and material facilities of settlements ranging in size and complexity from a temporary camp to a great metropolis. To distinguish early-stage settlements from more established ones, the term 'Settlement' is reserved for this general concept, and 'EarlySettlement' for an early-stage settlement. acf243a4-24df-41d7-92f0-8a8fd5ad2507 A synonym for 'PopulatedPlace' used in Geographical Information systems. An Authority is an IntelligentAgent who has created a Rule. Usually, the Rule will be communicated to other Agents to follow (for some purpose), but in a special case an Authority (e.g. an individual person) may create a rule intended only for the Authority itself to follow e.g. a personal code of behavior). The Authority may have authority over a small domain - a parent over his/her children, for example, or the leader of a small group whos emembers consent to follow the rules of the leader. The owner of a property is an Authority for what can be done on that property, and can create a Rule prohibiting actions on that property. 'Authority' is a Role, and an individual Agent does not have to be classified as an Authority, unless the Agent participates in some action or relation that requires an Authority. The class of Synonyms has two uses: (1) When a synonymous term is included as a subtype of Synonym, it allows searching for a Type by more than one term, in the case where the alternative term(s) are also unique in the ontology. For example, where Cyc class names (but not meanings) have been changed, the Cyc term may also be included as a Synonym. We use the isaSynonymOf relation to relate Synonym classes to the class with the base name. (2) when used with the 'hasSynonym' relation, instances of Synonym can specify the context (such as namespace) in which the second term is a synonym of the first, and can indicate the overall frequency with which the term in that context actually has the same meaning as the base term. Since there can be multiple instances of the same synonymous term, it is represented as a datatype String entity. NOTE that instances of Synonym need to have unique id's as their identifiers in the ontology, so it is recommended that the unique ID's be generated by prefixing a namespace to the synonymous term that is pointed to by the 'hasSynonymousTerm' property of the Synonym instance. Thus if some term has the synonym 'process' in the PSL context, the instance of Synonym that specifies that relation can be named, e.g. 'PSL$process'. The general English contexts, where words may be ambiguous, is indicated by the namespace prefix 'engen'. A collection of spatially-localized individuals, including various actions and events as well as physical objects. Each instance of #$InformationBearingThing (or IBT ) is an item that contains information (for an agent who knows how to interpret it). Examples: a copy of the novel Moby Dick; a signal buoy; a photograph; an elevator sign in Braille; a map; a US dollar bill; a resume; a musical score; copies of the #$CycProgram. For representations of the propositional content of information bearing things, see #$PropositionalInformationThing; but note that not all IBTs have a propositional content (cf. #$ArtObject). An important specialization of #$InformationBearingThing is #$InformationBearingObject, which comprises all of those IBTs that are also physical objects (i.e. #$PartiallyTangibles). Though often a subtle task in particular contexts, it is important to distinguish the various specializations of #$InformationBearingThing from those of #$AspatialInformationStore (whose instances are the chunks of information instantiated in particular IBTs; see #$instantiationOfAIT) and from those of #$ConceptualWork (whose instances are the conceptual or artistic creations that are instantiated in particular IBTs; see #$instantiationOfWork). For instance, #$TextString is a specialization of #$AspatialInformationStore, #$TextualMaterial is a specialization of #$InformationBearingThing, and #$TextualPCW is a specialization of #$ConceptualWork; to conflate any of these with another would be to make a category error . Also note that events in which information is transferred (see #$InformationTransferEvent) are not considered instances of #$InformationBearingThing. Rather, such transfer events have as one of their participants (see #$actors) some instance of #$InformationBearingThing; though in cases where IBTs are themselves events this will require distinguishing very finely between the event that encodes the information and the event that is the information transfer. See also the sense-modality-based specializations, #$SoundInformationBearingThing and #$VisualInformationBearingThing. be436e7e-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002 The collection of wholly intangible individuals, a specialization of both #$Intangible and #$Individual. Instances of #$IntangibleIndividual are immaterial, and thus do not have mass, color, or other tangible qualities. Examples include mathematical objects (such as numbers, functions, and relations), attributes, time intervals, space regions, and events. Excluded are sets and collections because, although intangible, they are not individuals. IntangibleIndividual* A connected part of any space, physical or abstract. A Region does not have to be empty, but can be occupied by solid objects. For an empty region of space see 'FreeSpaceRegion'. NOTE that Region is disjoint with PhysicalObject, but not disjoint with Object (which can be abstract). A Feature is classified as an Object though it may also be a Region. BFO (SpatialRegion): Definition: A continuant at or in which other continuants can be located. COSMO note: in BFO, a SpatialRegion is the union of: Line, Point, Surface, and Volume. This is close to the present concept of 'Region', but those terms in COSMO are more abstract. A Feature is an Object or Region within the ConvexHull of an Object. The Object may be abstract. existsInContext is most useful to relate fictional, nythical, or hypothetical characters to the contexts in which they appear. It can be used to refer to the 'Real World', but that may be in most cases the default context that needs no explicit reference. A general 'overlap' relation for both regions and objects, abstract and physical. In COSMO Objects are distinct from the regions that they occupy, but for the purpose of this relation, the 'overlap' can be viewed as the spatial overlap of the regions occupied by objects, or of that region with some other region. Regions that are in any way adjacent, with no space between other than a point, line, or infinitesimally thick plane, are considered as 'touching' for this relation. This relation is used to express the relation between a Feature of an Object and the Objec tht has that Feature. The Feature can be part of the Object (a protrusion) or a region within the ConvexHull of the Object (e.g. the hole in a doughnut). Such a region overlapsOrTouches the Object it is parasitic upon. In Cyc a similar 'overlaps' relation is labeled 'overlaps-RCC' (for regional Connection Calulus). But that is for regions only, and differs from this COSMO relation. Cyc: (#$overlaps-RCC REG1 REG2) means that REG1 overlaps REG2, i.e., REG1 and REG2 have a common part. The three immediate specialization of #$overlaps-RCC are #$partiallyOverlaps-RCC, #$partOf-RCC and #$partOf-Inverse-RCC. Note that this relation is a #$negationPreds of #$externallyConnectsWith-RCC, compare also with #$discreteFrom-RCC. bf636392-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 Every Group consists of one or more entities considered as one unit, and is related to the component entities by the relation 'hasComponentElement'. A Group is not an abstract or mathematical concept - every group derives its properties solely from the entities that are its component elements. Thus a group of solid objects would be a solid object, and the mass of that object would be equal to the sum of the masses of the component objects. It has *some* similarity to the 'mereological sum' of mereologists. However, a Group may have component elements of very diverse kinds - there is no restriction on the membership of a Group, though one element can only count once in the cardinality of the group. A Group is somewhat similar to a Cyc 'Group', but is not restricted to physical things, and has relations to its members named differently than in Cyc. NOTE: A Group that has one component element is identical to that single element; in this respect it is similar to the mereological notion of a 'mereological sum'. The only group that can have itself as a component element is the group of one element. This latter property is the peculiar characteristic of this concept of 'Group', in contrast to other aggregates except, as noted, for 'mereological sum'. This concept of 'Group' makes certain representations covenient. In some cases, we want to define a function that may return one or more elements, but if there is one element, we also want that single element to be identical to the single element, and not encapsulated in an enveloping element. Returning a Group will allow that behavior. Note that a relation on a Group that can be applied to individuals (i.e. is not specifically defined on the type 'Group' or a subtype thereof) will be interpreted as meaning that the relation applies to each member of the Group individually. Therefore to say {(Every Dog) has (four Legs)} is to specify that each instance of Dog has four legs. The same effect can often be accomplished by an OWL restriction on the type. Cyc Documentation for 'Group' (NOTE some differences from COSMO 'Group'. In Cyc a Group must consist of Temporal Objects, but in COSMO it is more general. The Group membership relation also differs.) OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002 A collection of temporal objects. Each instance of #$Group is a composite object made up of one or more individual objects or events. A group is related to each of its members by the predicate #$groupMembers (q.v.) [COSMO: 'hasComponentElement'] Note that instances of #$Group are _not_ collections. A group has temporal extent [COSMO: a Group may be abstract] and might have spatial location, while a collection is timeless and nonspatial. It is of course possible to define a collection parallel to any given group, so that the instances of the collection are exactly the group-members of that group; e.g. each toe on my left foot (and nothing else) is both an instance of the collection of my left toes and a member of the group of toes on my left foot. But that group (of my left toes) is a spatiotemporal thing while the correlated collection (of my left toes) is not. Similarly, if a certain flock of pigeons is considered as having a location, a spatial extent, and a time of existence, then the flock is being considered a _group_ and not a collection. Finally, unlike a collection, a group cannot be empty, but must have _at_least_one_ group-member. As a default, a group whose group-members all are instances of #$SomethingExisting is itself an instance of #$SomethingExisting, and a group whose group-members all are #$Events is itself an #$Event. Instances of #$Group include #$QueensGuard, #$ThreeWiseMen, #$SantasReindeer, and #$InternationalCommunity. A CompositeConcept is a Group that consists of component elements of different basic types, such as a System (which see). The notion of a CompositeConcept provides a way to represent things like situations that have essential elements of different type (such as States and FunctionalProcesses). An Entity that has a beginning point in time and an ending point in time. The usage of this term in COSMO differs from the usage in OpenCyc, in that it does **not** include PhysicalObject as a subtype, though the two categories are not disjoint. The purpose of the cyc concept appears to be to permit relating both PhysicalObjects and Events to their time location. In COSMO, that purpose is served by the relation 'hasTemporalLocation' (which see) which has as its domain the union of Events and PhysicalObjects.and 'wasCreatedDuring' and 'wasDestroyedDuring', There is, however, a subtle issue in that the beginning and ending time of a 'TemporalThing' may be the same time, i.e. the instance may be an instantaneous time slice of a time-extended entity. Since in COSMO zero-interval extended entities are indistinguishable from point entities, this means that a '3-D' endurantist object can be an instance of 'TemporalThing' just as a HumanRole, a '4-D' perdurantist object can be an instance of the typically '3-D' Person. In Opencyc a 'TemporalThing' is very generic, it is anything that has a beginning point in time (and presumably an ending point, though it may not be known for existing things). Thus physical objects, which must come into existence at some time (perhaps the beginning of time), as well as events, are 'TemporalThings'. In COSMO, TemporalThing is reserved for TimeIntervals and Events, and PhysicalObjects are not classified as subtypes of TemporalThing. The creation and destruction time of PhysicalObjects will use different relations. OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002 The collection of all things that have temporal extent or location, i.e. things about which one might sensibly ask When? . #$TemporalThing thus contains many kinds of things, including events, physical objects, agreements, and abstract pieces of time. Note that #$TimePoint is a specialization of #$TemporalThing, since time points have temporal location, although they arguably lack temporal extent. Abstract things that are timeless - such as mathematical sets, attributes, and numbers - are of course _not_ instances of #$TemporalThing. NOTE that although every TemporalThing must have a starting and ending TimePont, that notion is not represented as an existential restriction so that it will not be necessary to explicitly represent the starting and ending times of intervals whose starting and ending times can be calculated from the name. This is a pragmatic and implementational, not a theoretical consideration. A Pair is a Group containing exactly two elements. 2 A LinearlyOrderedGroup is a Group that has a linear ordering, which is a mapping from the natural numbers to elements of the Group. It will usually have more than one element, but may have only one. A OrderedPair is a Tuple containing two elements. hasQuantifier relates a QuantitativeAttributeValue to the quantifier that indicates how many units large the value is. A Number is both a Quantity and an Object. This contrasts with PhysicalQuantity, which is a Quantity and an AttributeValue. Pure numbers and physical quantities (numbers plus units of measure) are disjoint entities. Any Number that can be expressed as a (possibly infinite) decimal, i.e. any Number that has a position on the number line. 'hasLowerLimit' relates an instance of 'Number' or 'NumberRange' to a datatype number, which is below or equal to the lowest possible value for the RealNumber. Whether the limit is inclusive or exclusive depends on the context in which it is used. This is a way to relate reified instances of number in the ontology to datatype numbers. See, for example,'GreaterThanHalf'. 'hasUpperLimit' relates an instance of 'Number' or 'NumberRange' to a datatype number, which is above or equal to the highest possible value for the RealNumber. Whether the limit is inclusive or exclusive depends on the context in which it is used. This is a way to relate reified instances of number in the ontology to datatype numbers. Any Number in some range that is greater than the specified value, related by the 'hasLowerLimit' relation. The range of permitted values does not include the limit. The implementation will have to interpret these numbers in whatever manner less-than and greater-than numbers are interpreted. 'GreaterThanHalf' is the type including all RealNumbers that have a numerical value greater than 0.5. 0.5 Any Number in some range that is less than the specified value, related by the 'hasUpperLimit' relation. The range of permitted values does not include the limit. The implementation will have to interpret these numbers in whatever manner less-than and greater-than numbers are interpreted. Any RealNumber that is not also a RationalNumber. A RealNumber that is greater than or equal to zero. A RealNumber that is less than zero. A RealNumber that is greater than zero. Any RealNumber that is the product of dividing two Integers. To represent a fraction in the name of a RationalNumber, the prefix 'N_' should be used, and to separate the two integers, an underscore can be used (to stay within the OWL naming conventions). Thus three-halves would be named 'N_3_2',and two-thirds would be 'N_2_3'. However, percents, which are also rational numbers, will have a different naming scheme. A RationalNumber that expresses a ratio of one quantity to another, multiplied by one hundred. This is distinguished from a pure number only in that it has the dimension 'percent'. For its use to express distributions, see 'PercentageAttribute'. A negative or nonnegative whole number. An Integer that is greater than or equal to zero. 'isWithinAnOrderOfMagnitudeOf' relates one numerical quantity (dimensionless number or ConstantQuantity) to another and asserts that the ratio r of the numerical values of the two fall in the range 10 > r > 0.1 Thus: {{3 meters} isWithinAnOrderOfMagnitudeOf {10 meters}}. 'isWithinaFactorOfTwoOf' relates one numerical quantity (dimensionless Number or ConstantQuantity) to another and asserts that the ratio r of the numerical values of the two fall in the range 2 > r > 0.5 Thus: {{3 meters} isWithinaFactorOfTwoOf {2 meters}}. 'isApproximatelyEqualTo' relates one numerical quantity (dimensionless Number or ConstantQuantity) to another and asserts that the ratio r of the numerical values of the two fall in the range 1.5 > r > 0.6667. Thus: {{4 meters} isApproximatelyEqualTo {3 meters}}. 'isAlmostTheSameAs' relates one numerical quantity (dimensionless Number or ConstantQuantity) to another and asserts that the ratio r of the numerical values of the two fall in the range 1.11111 > r > 0.9. Thus: {{10 meters} isApproximatelyEqualTo 11 meters}}. COSMO note: the quantities related by this relation must be instances of types in the ontology, not datatype quantities. Cyc: A #$NumericComparisonPredicate that is a generalization of the mathematical less-than ( < ) relation to #$ScalarIntervals (q.v.) of all sorts, including quantitative intervals as well as point values (see #$ScalarPointValue). (#$lessThan VALUE1 VALUE2) means that VALUE1 is less than VALUE2 with respect to some scale that they are both on. More precisely, there is some #$TotallyOrderedScalarIntervalType SCALE that both VALUE1 and VALUE2 are instances of and either (i) SCALE is a specialization of #$NumericValue (e.g. #$RealNumber) and the maximum (see #$maxQuantValue) of VALUE1 is less than the minimum (see #$minQuantValue) of VALUE2 or (ii) (#$followingValueOnScale VALUE1 VALUE2 SCALE) holds. Note that #$lessThan is an #$ELRelation (q.v.), and the above sentence would actually canonicalize to (#$greaterThan VALUE2 VALUE1). bd5880b1-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A #$NumericComparisonPredicate that is a generalization of the mathematical less-than-or-equal-to ( <= ) relation to #$ScalarIntervals (q.v.) of all sorts, including quantitative intervals as well as point values (see #$ScalarPointValue). (#$lessThanOrEqualTo VALUE1 VALUE2) means that VALUE1 is less than or equal to VALUE2 with respect to some scale that they are both on. More precisely, there is some #$TotallyOrderedScalarIntervalType SCALE that both VALUE1 and VALUE2 are instances of and either (i) SCALE is a specialization of #$NumericValue (e.g. #$RealNumber) and the maximum (see #$maxQuantValue) of VALUE1 is less than or equal to the minimum (see #$minQuantValue) of VALUE2, (ii) (#$followingValueOnScale VALUE1 VALUE2 SCALE) holds, or (iii) (#$equals VALUE1 VALUE2) holds. Note that #$lessThanOrEqualTo is an #$ELRelation (q.v.), and the above sentence would actually canonicalize to (#$greaterThanOrEqualTo VALUE2 VALUE1). bd5880b0-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A #$NumericComparisonPredicate (q.v.) that is a generalization of the mathematical greater-than-or equal-to (>=;) relation to #$ScalarIntervals (q.v.) of all sorts, including quantitative intervals (see #$NumericInterval and #$Quantity) as well as point values (see #$ScalarPointValue). (#$greaterThanOrEqualTo VALUE1 VALUE2) means that VALUE1 is greater than or equal to VALUE2 with respect to some scale that they are both on. More precisely, there is some #$TotallyOrderedScalarIntervalType SCALE; that both VALUE1; and VALUE2; are instances of and either (i) SCALE; is a specialization of #$NumericInterval (e.g. #$RealNumber) and the minimum (see #$minQuantValue) of VALUE1; is greater than or equal to the maximum (see #$maxQuantValue) of VALUE2;, (ii) (#$followingValueOnScale VALUE2 VALUE1 SCALE); holds, or (iii) (#$equals VALUE1 VALUE2); holds. See also #$greaterThan and #$lessThanOrEqualTo. bd5880af-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A #$NumericComparisonPredicate that is a generalization of the mathematical greater-than ( > ) relation to #$ScalarIntervals (q.v.) of all sorts, including quantitative intervals (see #$NumericInterval and #$MeasurableQuantity) as well as point values (see #$ScalarPointValue). (#$greaterThan VALUE1 VALUE2); means that VALUE1; is greater than VALUE2; with respect to some scale that they are both on. More precisely, there is some #$TotallyOrderedScalarIntervalType SCALE that both VALUE1; and VALUE2; are instances of and either (i) SCALE; is a specialization of #$NumericInterval (e.g. #$RealNumber) and the minimum (see #$minQuantValue) of VALUE1; is greater than the maximum (see #$maxQuantValue) of VALUE2; or (ii) (#$followingValueOnScale VALUE2 VALUE1 SCALE); holds. bd5880b2-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 An Integer that is greater than zero. An Integer that is less than zero. A standard of measurement for some dimension. For example, the Meter is a UnitOfMeasure for the dimension of length, as is the Inch. There is no intrinsic property of a UnitOfMeasure that makes it primitive or fundamental; rather, a system of units (e.g. SystemeInternationalUnit) defines a set of orthogonal dimensions and assigns units for each. NOTE that each UnitOfMeasure is represented as a 'QuantitativeAttributeValue' which means that it has a Quantifier and a UnitOfMeasure. This convention means that a unit of measure is just *some* instance of measure that is chosen as the 'unit'. This requires that the Quantifier be the number 1, and the UnitOfmeasure be the unit itself. This may seem a bit peculiar, and might be changed if it seems desirable. Cyc: A specialization of #$ScalarDenotingFunction (q.v.). Each instance of #$UnitOfMeasure is a function that takes one or two numbers or other #$NumericIntervals as arguments, and returns as value a #$MeasurableQuantity (q.v.), such as a #$Distance or a #$Speed or a #$Volume. If a unit of measure is applied to one number (see #$Number-General) the result is a precise quantity that is a #$ScalarPointValue; if applied to two (different) numbers -- or to one (or two) #$ProperIntervalOnNumberLine(s) -- the result is a closed-interval quantity that is a #$ScalarProperInterval. For example, (#$Meter 5) is the distance five meters and (#$Meter 5 10) is the distance five to ten meters (inclusive) . (A partial exception to the above is the unit-of-measure #$Unity (q.v.), which always returns a #$NumericInterval rather than a #$MeasurableQuantity.) Specializations of #$UnitOfMeasure grouped by what they measure include #$UnitOfTime, #$UnitOfSpeed, and #$UnitOfVolume. Other specializations are #$OneDimensionalUnitOfMeasure, #$MultiDimensionalUnitOfMeasure, #$UnitOfMeasureWithPrefix and #$UnitOfMeasureNoPrefix. bd5880aa-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A Measurement is an OrderedPair representing the result of a MeasurementEvent. It is an abstract representation of a MeasurableQuantity. Each instance of Measurement is an OrderedPair in which the first element is a UnitOfMeasure or other Quantifiable AttributeValue, and the second element is a quantity expressing some kind of magnitude associated with that UnitOfMeasure. The magnitude will typically be a number indicating, for example, how many individuals have that attribute, or a percentage indicating what fraction of a group have that Attribute. A Prevalence will typically be one element of a Distribution. NOTE that a Measurement does not have to use actual numbers in the 'Quantifier' field - a Measurement may be approximate, using quantities like 'High', 'Low', etc. qualifying an AttributeValue, but it does have to modify a unit of measure. COSMO: SituationProcessEventOrState is a broad category that includes Events, FunctionalProcesses, and PersistentStates,all of which are different aspects of the same fundamental conceptual entity, commonly called an 'Event'. Each instance of 'SituationProcessEventOrState' in COSMO is a Group of TimeIndexedAssertion, in aggregate representing the changes (if any) to the properties (attributes and relations) of one or more objects over some interval of time, An InstantaneousState may have only one TimeIndexedAssertion, but Events and FunctionalProcesses will have at least two. Event is a Group of 'TimeIndexedAssertion's containing the component elements: (1) InstantaneousState at the starting time (2) InstantaneousState at the Ending time (3) The FunctionalProcess that describes the intermediate states between the starting and ending times. **Informally**, a state,process, or event is interpreted as the set of *values* of some 'fluents' (attributes or relations that may change over time), but the actual *formal* representation is a Group in which the group elements are the *LinguisticAssertions* specifying the values of the fluents pertaining to some Group of Objects. Each LinguisticAssertion specifies the value at some time point (or time interval). The differences in State, Process,and Event are: State: The Group of Assertions that hold at one time point (InstantaneousState), or persist without change of value over some contiguous interval of time (PersistentState). No value can chage within a State. FunctionalProcess: The full set of LinguisticAssertions specifying the values of fluents at each time point or smaller TimeInterval within a TimeInterval in which the Process is defined. The set of LinguisticAssertions relate times to values,and in that respect is analogous to a mathematical function. In analogy to a mathematical function, one can derive a 'rate' for a Process (in cases where the values are quantified) by taking the ratio of (difference in value) to (difference in time) for any TimeInterval in which a change of value is specified. This rate may change from time to time during a FunctionalProcess. Event: focuses on the values of the fluents at the beginning and ending of some TimeInterval, but also includes the FunctionalProcess that specifies the fluent values at times between the beginning and ending. Since the focus of an Event is on the change from one time point to the next, one cannot specify a 'rate' in the same sense as for a FunctionalProcess, where the rate may change many times during the FunctionalProcess. For an Event, one can derive a single 'rate' value that specifies the overall ratio of change of fluent value to time, between the beginning and ending points, and for an Event, only one such 'rate' can be defined. NOTE: In COSMO a Situation is classified as a CompositeConcept because it is considered as a composite of the InstantaneousStates at the beginning and ending times of the Situation (which can be the same time), plus the FunctionalProcess that describes the states intermediate between the beginning and ending times. Called: Situation-Temporal(Cyc) perdurant(DOLCE) ***** Special COSMO NOTE on BFO 'ProcessualEntity' ***************************** In BFO the Type 'ProcessualEntity' appears to be most closely similar to COSMO 'SituationProcessEventOrState'. However, the division of the BFO Type into 'FiatProcessPart' and 'Process' has no corresponding division in Cyc or SUMO. In COSMO we include a FiatProcessPart for compatibility, but do not use it (no subtypes), and do not use the BFO partition of 'ProcessualEntity'. BFO Definition: An occurrent that exists in time by occurring or happening, has temporal parts and always involves and depends on some SNAP entity. Examples: the life of an organism, the process of meiosis, the course of a disease, the flight of a bird ***** End Special NOTE on BFO 'ProcessualEntity' ***************************** Cyc 'Situation' is indistinguishable from 'Situation-Temporal' except for the possible inclusion in 'Situation' of abstract situations not enclosed in a time interval. The term 'Situation' has been interpreted in COSMO as strictly temporal, and the more abstract things that resenble situations have been aggregated under 'AbstractEvent'. Cyc ('Situtation') A subcollection of both #$IntangibleIndividual and #$TemporalThing. #$Situation subsumes #$Event and #$StaticSituation. Each instance of #$Situation is a state or event consisting of one or more objects having certain properties, or bearing certain relations to each other. OPENCYC 1: (Situation-Temporal) MAY 23, 2002 A subcollection of both #$Situation and #$TemporalThing. #$Situation-Temporal is the collection of all instances of #$Situation that have duration or other temporal properties . Thus, #$Situation-Temporal subsumes #$Event and #$StaticSituation, as well as some other specializations of #$Situation. It does _not_ subsume any specializations of #$Situation that have atemporal instances. DOLCE: Perdurants (AKA occurrences) comprise what are variously called events, processes, phenomena, activities and states. They can have temporal parts or spatial parts. For instance, the first movement of (an execution of) a symphony is a temporal part of the symphony. On the other hand, the play performed by the left side of the orchestra is a spatial part. In both cases, these parts are occurrences themselves. We assume that objects cannot be parts of occurrences, but rather they participate in them. Perdurants extend in time by accumulating different temporal parts, so that, at any time they are present, they are only partially present, in the sense that some of their proper temporal parts (e.g., their previous or future phases) may be not present. E.g., the piece of paper you are reading now is wholly present, while some temporal parts of your reading are not present yet, or any more. Philosophers say that endurants are entities that are in time, while lacking temporal parts (so to speak, all their parts flow with them in time). Perdurants, on the contrary, are entities that happen in time, and can have temporal parts (all their parts are fixed in time). Each Event in COSMO is a Group of 'TimeIndexedAssertion's, in aggregate representing the changes to the properties (attributes and relations) of one or more objects over some interval of time, and containing the component elements: (1) InstantaneousState at the starting time (2) InstantaneousState at the Ending time (3) The FunctionalProcess that describes the intermediate states between the starting and ending times. **Informally**, a state,process, or event in COSMO is interpreted as the set of *values* of some 'fluents' (attributes or relations that may change over time), but the actual *formal* representation is a Group in which the group elements are the *TimeIndexedAssertions* specifying the values of the fluents pertaining to some Group of Objects, at some TimePoint or TimerInterval. he differences between State, Process,and Event are: State: The Group of Assertions that hold at one time point (InstantaneousState), or persist without change of value over some contiguous interval of time (PersistentState). No value can chage within a State. NOTE that one can represent the state of an individual relation or attribute for some Object, without specifying how other attributes may or may not change. Therfore one can, for example, represent a Feeling as a PersistentState that continues without change in value over somme interval of time, while other attributes or relatikons on the same Person change dramatically. Each attribute of each Object represented in a State can be represented as a State separately from the states of other Objects. FunctionalProcess: The full set of LinguisticAssertions specifying the values of fluents at each time point or smaller TimeInterval within a TimeInterval in which the Process is defined. The set of LinguisticAssertions relate times to values,and in that respect is analogous to a mathematical function. In analogy to a mathematical function, one can derive a 'rate' for a Process (in cases where the values are quantified) by taking the ratio of (difference in value) to (difference in time) for any TimeInterval in which a change of value is specified. This rate may change from time to time during a FunctionalProcess. **NOTE** A FunctionalProcess may also be defined, not by specifying the individual values of the fluents at points in time, but by specifying the manner in which a fluent can change over time. One specific example of this is a **differential equation** which can be used to take the value of a fluent at some starting point in time, and calculate the values at subsequent points in time. Thus a FunctionalProcess can have, as its TimeIndexedAssertion, a differential equation. @ToDo: the specifics of how a differential equation are to be represented have not been elaborated as of v0.50. Event: focuses on the values of the fluents at the beginning and ending of some TimeInterval, but also includes the FunctionalProcess that specifies the fluent values at times between the beginning and ending. Since the focus of an Event is on the change from one time point to the next, one cannot specify a 'rate' in the same sense as for a FunctionalProcess, where the rate may change many times during the FunctionalProcess. For an Event, one can derive a single 'rate' value that specifies the overall ratio of change of fluent value to time, between the beginning and ending points, and for any instance of Event, only one such 'rate' can be defined. Although logically included in each Event are the starting and ending times, (see relations hasStartingTimePoint and hasEndingTimePoint), these may not be known, and creating an instance of Event does not require specifying those times if not known. NOTE that the FunctionalProcess which is a component of the Event *contains* all of the elements contained in the Event, in that it contains itself, and also contains the states at the beginning and end. While *containing* all of those elements, however, it is nevertheless a distinctly different concept, since the 'Event' specifically selects out of the FunctionalProcess the beginning and ending states as characteristic of the Event. The Event is not a FunctionalProcess, but *contains* a FunctionalProcess as a component element. A FunctionalProcess can be derived from an Event, and an Event can be derived from a FunctionalProcess that is defined over some interval of time. A 'FunctionalProcess' that has only one time point in it also represents a special kind of Event, the limiting case of an InstantaneousState. NOTE also that an instance of FunctionalProcess that is defined by a mathematical function relating properties to time must have associated with it some time interval during which it is asserted to be valid, in order to be an instance. NOTE also that this representation of Event does not resemble a perdurantist 'history' which focuses on some region of space-time. Regions of space-time are represented as 'SpatiotemporalRegion' in COSMO, but the only spatial regions of relevance to an Event are those that can be derived from the locations of the Objects that participate in an Event. The significant conceptual components of an Event are the properties ('fluents') of the Objects that participate in the Event, and insofar as the locations of the Objects may be, but are not necessarily, represented in the Event, those locations may be significant, but except in Events solely depicting motion, the locations are incidental rather than central to the changes represented by the Event. Each Event represents one or more changes that occur to the attributes or relations ('fluents') of one or more objects during some defined interval of time (or for abstract Events, within some interval on the dimension of causality); the net changes are represented by the state at the beginning of the event and the state at the end of the Event. In the physical world, real Events typically have multiple intermediate stages, and nothing occurs instantaneously, but some non-physical Events such as a change of title for a Person may occur at a precise moment by prior arrangement. The representation of intermediate stages of an Event can be explicit, with the included events related to the whole event by the 'hasSubEvent' relation or 'hasTemporalPart' relation. The first can be more specific about one of serveral fluents that vary during an event. The temporal part relation between Events must relate a subevent that includes alll of the fluents represented in the whole Event. Each Event includes implicitly a Process that specifies the course of each fluent between the start and end times. At this point (v0.39) there is no explicit representation of the included Process, but each FunctionalProcess will, if represented explicitly, have an associate time granularity indicating the minimal intervals over which the change in the fluents are represented. The size of the granularity intervals during which FunctionalProcess states are represented will depends on the discretion of the ontologist for the purposes of the representation. COSMO note: note that in some ontologies (and situation logics) , 'Event' is used to refer to a change in state that is considered instantaneous. In COSMO, suchan 'Event' is a subtype of the more general event, which is a change in state that occurs over some interval of time (which, for instantaneous changes would be a zero-length time interval). NOTE also that for some Events, such as cyclic Events, merely representing the starting and ending states - which may be identical - loses the whole meaning of the Event; so intermediate states must also be represented in some manner to provide meaning to the Event. Called: Event(Cyc); Process(SUMO); event(DOLCE); Processual(SPAN-BFO) ************ NOTE on BFO 'Process' ****************************** COSMO: BFO the Type most closely representing COSMO 'Event' is 'Process', so that BFO type is made synonymous with ''Event'. BFO makes teh distinction between 'Fiat' events (FiatProcessPart = parts of events) and complete events. This Type represents the complete Event with well-defined beginnings and ends. The FiatProcessPart event is included for compatibility, though not yet used. BFO ('Process') Definition: A processual entity that is a maximally connected spatio-temporal whole and has bona fide beginnings and endings corresponding to real discontinuities. BFO Examples: the life of an organism, the process of sleeping, the process of cell-division ************ NOTE on BFO 'Process' ****************************** Cyc comment: An important specialization of #$Situation and thus also of #$IntangibleIndividual and #$TemporallyExistingThing (qq.v). Each instance of #$Event is a dynamic situation in which the state of the world changes; each instance is something one would say happens . Events are intangible because they are changes per se, not tangible objects that effect and undergo changes. Notable specializations of #$Event include #$Event-Localized, #$PhysicalEvent, #$Action, and #$GeneralizedTransfer. #$Events should not be confused with #$TimeIntervals (q.v.). The temporal bounds of events are delineated by time intervals, but in contrast to many events time intervals have no spatial location or extent. COSMO note: 'Event' was merged with Cyc 'PhysicalEvent' and Cyc 'Event-Localized' The Cyc 'StrictlyMentalEvent' is classified as a PhysicalEvent in COSMO. Cyc: (PhysicalEvent') A specialization of #$Event-Localized. Each instance of #$PhysicalEvent is a spatially localized event involving one or more physical objects or stuffs. #$PhysicalEvents typically involve interaction among #$PartiallyTangibles. But note that a physical event might consist in the creation, destruction, movement, or a change in some physical feature of a single salient physical object. (See #$PhysicalCreationEvent, #$PhysicalDestructionEvent, #$MovementEvent, and #$IntrinsicStateChangeEvent.) For a contrasting (though not necessarily disjoint) collection, see #$StrictlyMentalEvent. For events that have both physical and mental components, see the collection #$CompositePhysicalAndMentalEvent. Cyc ('Event-Localized'): A specialization of #$Event. #$Event-Localized is the collection of all events that occur at a specific location in space. Notable specializations of #$Event-Localized include #$PhysicalEvent and #$AnimalActivity. bd58800d-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 COSMO: Context is a very general class of entities that can affect the truth of a logical sentence; within any given Context, the factual assertions should all be logically consistent. A Context may be relevant to the internal states and processes of a computational system, or may more generally describe the broad situation in which an Agent finds itself when processing information for the purpose of making a decision. For the latter agent context, the subtype 'SituationalContextComponent' is relevant. A Context can be a time interval, location, belief system, fictional world, theory, hypothetical world, counterfactual situation, segment of text, DatabaseGroup, or the state of our own real world, among other things. Contexts can be nested, combined, or intersected. For example, a Context consisting of a TimeInterval can be intersected with a Context consisting of a GeographicalArea to make a Context within with assertions are explicitly true only in that time and place. That does not mean, of course that the assertion cannot be true elsewhere; it just doesn't guranteee truth elsewhere. Every assertion in the COSMO ontology is implicitly true only in the context of the COSMO ontology, which is itself a theory. But that implicit qualification does not appear directly in any asertion - it can be explicitly mentioned if and when COSMO assertions are referenced in other ontologies. The nesting of Contexts provides a mechanism to create a 'lattice' of theories. In a subcontext for any given Context, all the assertions of the parent Context will be true in the subcontext, and additional assertions may also be true. In this respect, a Context is similar to the 'Microtheories' of the Cyc ontology system; it also has some resemblance to the 'Environments' discussed by Ballim and Wilks ('Artifical Believers', Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991). One specialized example of Context is a 'DatabaseGroup'. In a particular Organization, its set of Databases, if intended to represent some consistent group of facts, can be viewed and represented as a Context within which reasoning may be performed. Each SituationalContextComponent is one of the components of the situation in which an IntelligentEntity finds itself, of which it must be aware in order to act or respond appropriately so as to fulfill its goals. Each SituationalContextComponent is defined relative to a particular CognitiveAgent whose actions are being represented in the ontology. Quantities can be numbers (integer, real, imaginary) or number ranges or approximate numbers, or distributions, or restricted ranges (greater than or less than), or PhysicalQuantities, which are measures. Numbers may have different qualitative dimensions (scales), and quantitative comparisons will generally only be meaningful when two numbers are expressed on the same scale. A QuantitativeAttributeValue is a value for some AttributeType which is expressed in quantitative measures, comnsisting of a quantifier and a unit of measure.. Examples (using the ESKIF format) are {10 feet} and {32 degreesF}. In formalisms such as OWL that do not have function terms or higher-arity relations, each such QuantitativeAttributeValue must be constructed as an instance that has relations pointing to the quantifier and the UnitOfMeasure. In OWL, where bare numbers are not allowed as labels for elements, the numbers may be represented using a NamespacePrefix in front of the number, such as N_10 (for 10) (for a range) R_29-30. Each instance of QuantitativeAttributeValue is an OrderedPair, the first element of which is a Quantifier (or QuantifierType) and the second element a UnitOfMeasure. A QuantifierType is allowed as a value in order to represent reified ranges of values. See 'GreaterThanHalf' for an example. When an instance of QuantitativeAttributeValue is represented by creating a reified instance, the UnitOfMeasure and the quantifier are specified by using the relations 'hasUnit' and 'hasQuantifier' to specify , respectively. . If an implementation allows use of functions, a QuantitativeAttributeValue can be represented, without reification in the ontology, as a function term such as {25.6 feet} or {N_25.6 feet}, depending on whether the implementation allows bare numbers in expressions. The NamespacePrefix 'N_' can be used for numbers, and 'R_' can be used for NumberRanges. Each 'TwoArgumentValue' is an AttributeValue that specifies the two argument values for an instance of a CompactedTernaryRelation. This is a mechanism to reresent ternary relations in the binary relation format of OWL.. Each instance of 'TwoArgumentValue' will have relations pointing to the two arguments that make up the ternary assertion that is represented. A FunctionalProcess corresponds to the linguistic intuition of something happening at some point in time, rather than something that has happened in some interval of time, which is an Event. Intuitively, it may be considered as the time derivative of an Event: a Process occurring over some interval of time gives rise to an Event, which is a change (or series of changes) in the properties of some Objects during some interval of Time. Every FunctionalProcess is intimately associated with some Event as one of the components of that Event (see 'Event'). NOTE that this differs from the notion of 'process' used in Cyc, where a Process is a kind of Event that can be subdivided and still result in an Event of the same kind. In COSMO taking some temporal part of a FunctionalProcess does not necessarily result in a FunctionalProcess of the same kind. **NOTE** A FunctionalProcess may also be defined, not by specifying the individual values of the fluents at points in time, but by specifying the manner in which a fluent can change over time. One specific example of this is a **differential equation** which can be used to take the value of a fluent at some starting point in time, and calculate the values at subsequent points in time. Thus a FunctionalProcess can have, as its TimeIndexedAssertion, a differential equation. This is an important difference between Event and FunctionalProcess. @ToDo: the specifics of how a differential equation are to be represented have not been elaborated as of v0.50. Formally, a FunctionalProcess is a Group consisting of one or more TimeIndexedAssertions, where each TimeIndexedAssertion is an InstantaneousState or PersistentState. Each State contains a Group of assertions specifying the values of the fluents that hold at that TimePoint; if only one Object is a participant in the FunctionalProcess, thre may be only one TimeIndexedAssertion in each State. A TimeIndexedAssertion can be a differential equation relating a fluent to time. Thus if, at some point in time, someone is Running, one can say that a Running process exists at that point, and that person is a participant in the process. The 'existence' of an instance of Process at some time point implies that some Event has taken place (or is taking place) in the time interval including that time point, and vice-versa, each Event implies existence of some corresponding FunctionalProcess at every time point during the interval between the beginning and end of the Event (**but see next paragraph**). But for linguistic purposes, it may be more convenient to represent just the Event or just the FunctionalProcess, and not explicitly represent the corresponding entity, which is nevertheless implied. The list of States over time has some similarity to a ValueTimeEntry, though the former relates the state assertions themselves, rather than the values. **It is possible for a FunctionalProcess to be discontinuous, such as an 'eating' process during which one is not actually ingesting anything - perhaps reading a paper in the intervals between taking bites of a meal; or a 'going to school' process during which one sleeps, watches television, etc., other than actually being in the school or studying. One may formally say that the process continues int the intervals when the relevant fluents are not changing, but that the intervals between actual progression of the process each consists of a null process (PersistentState) which is part of the whole process, and give rise to null events which are parts of the whole event.** The term 'process' has been often used to refer to Procedures, (see 'Procedure') which are specifications for some sequence of actions that accomplish a goal. That is a distinct, though somewhat related concept. In some ontologies, (such as Cyc) a 'process' is a type of Event which has some uniform character throughout the Event. Because of the variant usage, the bare term 'process' is not used in this ontology to avoid confusion. Thus this base Type is called 'FunctionalProcess' to specifically refer to its similarity to a mathematical function. It resembles a mathematical function in certain respects: a FunctionalProcess can be said to describe the state of some system as a function of time. Like a function, a FunctionalProcess can have properties, and one important property will be the Rate at which the represented change is occurring. A characteristic of a FunctionalProcess is one can specify a Rate at some time point, or an average rate in some time interval. There is no corresponding Rate that can be specified for an Event, even though the two concepts are otherwise very similar. Most ontologies deal with Events, and ignore Processes of this type. For representing certain linguistic phrases, however, this type is better suited than the Event type. Most FunctionalProcesses are not represented explicitly in COSMO at version 0.3, but when needed may be generated by a function (not yet defined) that takes an Event and returns the Process that is operating to generate that Event. One issue not yet dealt with in COSMO v0.3 is whether a function that can generate a Process from the corresponding Event can handle Events whose definition specifies more than one Fluent as changing during the Event. In such cases, to have a clear relation, the multiple fluents must be ordered similarly in the representation of the Event and its corresponding FunctionalProcess. A specialization of #$Situation. Each instance of #$Situation-Localized is a situation whose temporal extent occurs at a specific location in space. Notable specializations of #$Situation-Localized include #$PhysiologicalCondition and #$Event-Localized. 71236476-8636-41d7-88b4-b7549eb3213c OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002 The collection of all spatial things, tangible or intangible, that can be meaningfully said to have location or position in the empirically observable universe of the context in question. This includes all #$PartiallyTangible things, such as pyramids and ships, as well as certain #$Intangible spatial things, like the #$Equator. Also included are all #$Events that can be pinned down to specific places (see #$Event-Localized), and thus all #$PhysicalEvents. But note that many events are non-examples, such as the event of a certain law coming into effect and (presumably) purely mental events as well, at least in most contexts. Also excluded are #$SpatialThings that are _not_ localized, such as purely abstract geometrical figures (e.g. a Platonic sphere). All instances of #$SpatialThing-Localized are temporal things, and thus have finite lifespans (the upper bound of which is the lifespan of the universe itself). Finally, note that imaginary entities like Frodo, Captain Queeg, and #$HAL9000-TheComputer may be localized within the (imaginary) universes attaching to the fictitious contexts in which they are defined, and so would be instances of #$SpatialThing-Localized within those microtheoretic contexts. NOTE: because Cyc 'SpatialThing-Localized' includes intangible spatial things, this is not identical to the purely physical objects such as 'Oject' in SUMO. In COSMO,purely physical objects are categorized in the Type 'PhysicalObject', which is a subtype of this 'SpatialThing-Localized' category. COSMO: this BFO Type is interpreted as an Event, but one that is specifically represented as not a complete Event (i.e. not a 'Process' in BFO). It is unclear under what circumstances designating an Event as 'Fiat' will be useful, but this is included for compatibility. BFO Definition: A processual entity that is part of a process but that does not have bona fide beginnings and endings corresponding to real discontinuities. Examples: chewing during a meal, the middle part of a rainstorm, the worst part of a heart-attack, the most interesting part of Van Gogh's life. COSMO note: In real physical Events, the precise boundaries can be fuzzy, but most Events of interest will have conceptually fairly well-defined beginnings and ends (periods duting which the fluents (attributes) of interest are static), even if those beginnings and ends stretch out over some period of time. We anticipate that most Events will be classified under 'Event' as subtypes of the BFO 'Pocess' which is intended to *not* be a Fiat Process (event). Thus this category may rarely if ever be used for classification. fiat_process_part BFO Definition: A processual entity that is the fiat or bona fide process boundary. BFO Examples: birth, death, the forming of a synapse, the onset of REM sleep, the detaching of a finger in an industrial accident, the final separation of two cells at the end of cell-division, the incision at the beginning of a surgery process_boundary An AttributeValue is the actual value of some AttributeType possessed by some object, such as six feet for a length, or red for a color. Individual AttributeValues are represented as Types (classes) in COSMO, not as instances. IMPORTANT NOTE: the values represented by each of these AttributeValue Types are here viewed as a region ('Quality Space') in which the actual particular value (see Type 'Quality') is located. Thus one may say an object has a 'Red' color, but later refine the description to say it has a 'Fire Red' color. The 'Fire Red' is also a color region, contained within the 'Red' color region. For quantitative measures, representing attributes as classes allows approximate measures to be built in to the ontology itself. One may specify a range for a measure, and any other measure within or overlapping that range can be considered as 'indistinguishable from' (not 'equal to') the other measure. NOTE: under consideration - the possibility of expressing the possession of an attribute for some interval of time by creating instances of AttributeValue or of Attribute that are also TimeSlices, with the time interval of the TimeSlice representing the time interval during which the Attribute was had. This has an advantage over using TimeSlice to create 4D TimeSlices of an object, and then attributing an Attribute to it - in that one need not create new instances of an Object, which may not be easily associated with the 3D object. COSMO note: A MeasurableQuantity is some attribute of which a number (or other quantifier) is a part, and also has a unit of measure. This is disjoint from pure numbers. Cyc: A specialization of #$Quantity (q.v.). This is the collection of quantities that have a numeric component and could actually be used to measure something, as opposed to (say) merely ranking it on a scale. Arithmetic operations (such as addition and multiplication) can be performed on measurable quantities, as they can on purely numeric scalars (see #$NumericInterval). Specializations of #$MeasurableQuantity include #$Distance, #$Temperature, #$Mass, and #$Time-Quantity. Other, broader specializations are #$OneDimensionalQuantity, #$TwoDimensionalQuantity, and #$ThreeDimensionalQuantity. Any quantity (that at least in principle could be) returned by a #$UnitOfMeasure (q.v.) function is a measurable quantity. In CycL, particular measurable quantities are usually represented as the result of applying a unit-of-measure function to a real number or pair of reals. For example, (#$Meter 5) is the distance 5 meters. afed8d1a-9eec-41d8-9da0-be55cb160c1a A TemporalLocation is a location for something - usually an Event - in the universal time line of our real world, or some alternative reality. It may be a time interval or a point in time. Instances of TemporalLocation may be represented by a DateTimeString , without being reified as an actual instance of this Type. This category includes the conceptual 'Datetime' Entity that is pointed to by the common relations like 'CREATION_DATETIME' that occur in databases. This entity is often represented by a built-in dataype of 'DateTime' or something similar. In COSMO, a DateTime is represented by subtpyes of DateTimeString, an AbstractString. A location in time can serve as a Context, which is anything that can affect the truth of a statement. In the real world, virtually every statement about real-world objects is true only in some particular time interval. RELATIVITY: Time is assumed in COSMO to be measured by some clock, which by default is the NIST atomic clock set, but can be specified as some other clock. Thus a time slice of a spatiotemporal region will be unambiguous, and observers moving relative to that clock, or relative to each other, need to adjust their interpretation according to the equations of relativity. In COSMO there is a superfluous subtype link of this entity to the most general 'Thing' so that 'time' will be exposed to viewers of this ontology at the highest level in Protege, for perspicuity. ******** NOTE on BFO 'TemporalRegion' *********************** The BFO 'TemporalRegion' appears to be the closest BFO Type to the COSMO 'TemporalLocation'. BFO Definition ('TemporalRegion'): An occurrent that is part of time. BFO: Examples ('TemporalRegion'): the time it takes to run a marathon, the duration of a surgical procedure, the moment of death COOSMO note: this is not a *quantity* of time, as the BFO example might suggest, but a *location* in time. 'ten minutes' is not an instance of 'TemporalLocation'. ******** NOTE on BFO 'TemporalRegion' *********************** TimeInterval is not a quantity of time (what is measured by a stopwatch), but a it is a specific region of the time line, what is measured by a calendar (in our real world or in some hypothetical world). Called: TimeInterval(Cyc); TimeInterval(SUMO - but SUMO requires contiguous intervals); time-interval(DOLCE) or period_in_time(ISO15926); the BFO equivalents of TimeInterval ('TemporalInterval') and TimePoint ('TemporalInstant') are disjoint in BFO, but a TimePoint is a subtype of TimeInterval in COSMO. For a quantity of time, use 'TimeDuration'. COSMO NOTE: as a convenience, a calendar time interval can be given a name that conforms to the conventions of one of the DateTime strings defined in COSMO, such as a 'DateTimeExtendedGroup', providing an opportunity for an interpreter to recognize the referenced time interval solely from the name of the instance. See the example used in defining the TimeAndPlace 'WorldTradeCenter20010911'. In Cyc, TimeInterval is not a measure. SUMO: An interval of time. Note that a TimeInterval has both an extent and a location on the universal timeline. Note too that a TimeInterval has no gaps, i.e. this class contains only convex time intervals. OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002 A specialization of #$TemporalThing. Each instance of #$TimeInterval is a temporal thing characterized fully by its temporal attributes. For example, the year A.D. 1967 is an instance of #$TimeInterval; although many interesting things happened during that year, the year itself is completely defined by its temporal extent. On the other hand, the event of Neil Armstrong's walking on the Moon is an #$Event and not a #$TimeInterval, since it is not fully characterized by its temporal extent or other temporal attributes. Specializations of #$TimeInterval include #$CalendarYear, #$CalendarMonth, and #$FiscalQuarter. DOLCE: a region - (Space and Time are special kinds of regions, i.e. AttributeValues or measures) A temporal region, measured according to a calendar. NOTE that a redundant subtype link to 'SituationProcessEventOrState' is included just to make it easier to find TimeInterval in a drill-down search. GenericLocation is the Type representing the most general notion of location, which can be abstract or concrete, a region of space (including an abstract space, such as the Internet considered as a set of nodes and links, where the nodes can represent computers whose physical location may vary), a point in space, or a physical object (e.g. building, ship, room). NOTE that an Address is not a location, but a label for a location. See 'Address'. NOTE: although *almost* all GenericLocations are exclusively spatial in some way, there is one 'TimeAndPlace' that is spatiotemporal, being a region of space-time that specifies some region of space over some interval of time. Use of an instance of 'TimeAndPlace' as an argument of a location relation allows one to include the important time interval qualifier in location relations, even though one is using only binary relations. this would not be necessary in a representation with higher-arity relations. This is somewhat similar to the Cyc 'Location-Underspecified' Cyc comment: The collection of locations, tangible or otherwise, which are typically conceptualized by human beings for purposes of common-sense reasoning as 'locations'. This collection thus includes tangible Places such as #$Ireland-TheIsland, as well as metaphoric locations. For instance, many states-of-being are conceptualized as abstract locations, such as Trouble ('he saw trouble ahead'), Depression ('she fell into a ...'), #$Happiness ('they found bliss together'). be14f511-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 An AttributeType is a general category of attribute, i.e. some property that adheres in an object, such as length or mass or color or shape for physical objects. More abstract objects such as sets or groups may have more abstract attributes such as cardinality. The distinction between attributes and relations between entities is not absolute. COSMO note: The use of two distinct trees of attribute-related types (AttributeType and AttributeValue) is intended to enable assertions with a linguistic form such as: {Jack has Height {6 feet}) where the second argument 'Height' specifies the general type of attribute, and the value '{6 feet}' specifies the specific attribute value, where 'feet' is a function returning a distance measure. This generic attribute assertion can then be used with other types of attributes, such as: {Jack has Weight {60 kilograms}) and {Car037 has Color RedColor). OrganizationType is a metaclass used as the Type restriction on certain relations that take subclasses of Organization as their argument. COSMO note: In COSMO, an Organization differs from its representation in some other ontologies. In COSMO, an Organization is not a group of people, it is a MentalObject, an artifact created by people. the essence of an Organization is that it is organized. It therefore must have an explicit set of organizing principles (a charter or constitution) whether that is written or, as in some small informal organizations, merely retained in the minds of its members. In addition to its charter, an Organization will have one or more lists of associated agents (people or other organizations). There may be more than one list, and the 'members' may not be called members. A complex organization like a corporation may have several lists, e.g. board members, stockholders, corporate officers, employees, even long-term contractors. The relationships of the agents on those lists to the organization and to each other is specified in the charter. Any or all of the lists of associated agents ('members' in simple organizations) may be empty. An Organization can exist without members, and this differs from the specification in SUMO (below). There are some bordeline cases where groups of people have some degree of organizing principle, but no charter (consitution) developed specifically for that group. In those cases, such groups wll be instances of 'GroupOfPeople'. An example is a jury, which is called together by the judicial system, not organized by its members for their own purposes. A pick-up team of basketball or baseball players playing one day and not remaining as a team is also a GroupOfPeople. But stable suborganizations of larger organizations, such as a company or platoon of soldiers, is an Organization and not just a GroupOfPeople. Because an Organization in COSMO is not a physical object, the parts of Cyc or other ontologies that consider Organization as a subtype of group of people (a physical object) will be inconsistent. Some effort will be needed to convert Organizations in other ontologies to its representation in COSMO. When an Organization is said to act as an 'Agent', there necessarily must be some physical agent (person or computer program) that in fact performs the action. Thus the 'agency' of an organization differs from that of physical agents, as it will be indirect. Every Organization is an 'Authority' because it creates rules, at least for its own members with respect to the organization. SUMO: An Organization is a corporate or similar institution. The members of an Organization typically have a common purpose or function. Note that this class also covers divisions, departments, etc. of organizations. For example, both the Shell Corporation and the accounting department at Shell would both be instances of Organization. Note too that the existence of an Organization is dependent on the existence of at least one member (since Organization is a subclass of Collection). Accordingly, in cases of purely legal organizations, a fictitious member should be assumed. OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002 The collection of all organizations. Each instance of #$Organization is a group whose group-members are instances of #$IntelligentAgent. In each instance of #$Organization, certain relationships and obligations exist between the members of the organization, or between the organization and its members. Instances of #$Organization include both informal and legally constituted organizations. Each instance of #$Organization can undertake projects, enter into agreements, own property, and do other tasks characteristic of agents; consequently, #$Organization is a specialization of the collection #$Agent. Notable specializations of #$Organization include #$LegalGovernmentOrganization, #$CommercialOrganization, and #$GeopoliticalEntity. DOLCE: A socially-constructed person with a complex articulation of tasks, roles and figures. COSMO note: the superfluous parent Type 'Thing' was added so as to make this important Type easily visible by drill-down in the hierarchy. A PhysicalObject is an Object that has mass. The mass is relativistic, i..e the Object does not have to have rest mass; so, a photon and other fundamental particles are 'PhysicalObject's, just as are the ordinary objects like rocks, baseballs, and automobiles. In COSMO some quantity of substance (e.g. the water in a glass of water) is also a PhysicalObject (more specifically, an instance of the subtype 'LiquidObject'). Quantities of gas are also PhysicalObjects (more specifically, 'GaseousObject's such as the 'EarthsAtmosphere'). NOTE that a PhysicalSubstance such as Air or Water is not a PhysicalObject, but is the material of which PhysicalObjects consist. See PhysicalSubstance for more detail. Because the determining characteristic of a PhysicalObject is that it has some mass, COSMO has a restirction that all instances of PhysicalObject must specify the mass, using the relation 'hasMassInGrams'. This can be a nuisance when the mass is unknown, and the convention is adopted that a mass of '-1' will be interpreted as an unknown mass. The mass figures can be very approximate - at the OWL phase, the value of the relation 'hasMassInGrams' should be interpreted as only an approximation within an order of magnitude. When more precise mass figures are needed, the relation 'hasMass' can be used (with an instance of MassMeasure as the value), and this relation allows specifying a variance for the mass value. NOTE on '3D' vs '4D' objects: Some ontologists prefer to represent PhysicalObjects as extended in time, thereby forming a '4-dimensional' object ('perdurantism'). Others prefer only 3D objects ('endurantism'), with the time explicitly specified when relations hold on an object. In COSMO this category of 'PhysicalObject' is indeterminate as between a Perdurant and and Endurant - that is, the instances are not necessarily zero-duration time slices, nor are they necessarily time slices of finite duration. An instance of 'PhysicalObject' can be used in relations where the valid time interval for the relation is expllicit, or an instance can also be specified to be an instance of 'TimeSlice', in which case that instance is a 4-dimensional TimeSlice of a PhysicalObject, and any relations defined on that 4D instance hold only during the TimeInterval of the TimeSlice. See 'TimeSlice' for more detail on that type and its use. As a result, Roles such as 'Student', which are TemporalThings with a beginning and end time, can be classified as subtypes of this category. A TimePoint is a closed interval of time having zero length. The beginning TimePoint and Ending TimePoint are identical for any given TimePoint. The representation of a TimePoint as a zero-length time interval is only an alternate view of a TimePoint. (=> (isanInstanceOf ?TP TimePoint) (and (hasStartingTimePoint ?TP ?TP) (hasEndingTimePoint ?TP ?TP))) A TimePoint is classified here as a subclass of TimeInterval because we adopt the interpretation that a time interval of zero length duration is indistinguishable from a time point. We know from special relativity that time may proceed at different rates in objects that are moving relative to each other, so all time values must be relative to some clock. In the absence of any explicit clock designation, the NIST atomic clock signals transmitted from Boulder Colorado are considered as the clock of reference. A TimePoint may be represented by a limit expression, e.g. 'before Jan 1 2008', or by a range ('some time point between Jan 1 200 and Jan 1 2008'). This allows incomplete time information to be entered when not known exactly. This may be implemented by a functional expression, but is not yet formalized in COSMO version 0.44. ******* COSMO NOTE on BFO 'TimeInstant' ************ COSMO note: in COSMO, time points are subtypes of TimeInterval, so the 'disjoint' relation in BFO between TimePoint and TimeInterval was removed. BFO: owl:disjointWith rdf:resource='#TemporalInterval' BFO rdfs:subClassOf rdf:resource="#ConnectedTemporalRegion" BFO Definition: A connected temporal region comprising a single moment of time. BFO Examples: right now, the moment at which a finger is detached in an industrial accident, the moment at which a child is born, the moment of death ******* COSMO NOTE on BFO 'TimeInstant' ************ A List is a MentalObject, i.e. an Object without mass created by an IntelligentAgent, with the distinctive character that it is a linearly ordered arrangement of AbstractSymbolicObjects. A List may be empty, and has its own properties in addition to the properties of the constituent elements, therefore it is not a Group. Note that AbstractStrings are subtype of List. A List is ordered, and it can have the same entity in different positions in the llist. It is not a type of Set. A List has a 'first' and 'rest' component. The 'rest' can be another list, or null. Therefore a list may have one element (or none) Cyc comment: A specialization of #$Tuple. Each instance of #$List is a finite sequence of things with a first and last member-position, with each member-position other than the last having a successor member-position. As with tuples generally, lists allow for repetition of their members, so that the same item can appear at multiple member-positions in the same list. A list can be represented formally as a function from a finite index set of counting numbers, beginning with one, into the domain of all #$Things (but note that #$Lists are _not_ explicitly represented as functions in the Cyc ontology). Unlike an instance of #$Series (q.v.), a list is purely abstract (i.e. both aspatial and atemporal), and the only implied relation between an item and its successor in a list is the successor relation of the list itself. Technically, #$List is more specific than #$Tuple only in that the index set (see #$tupleIndexSet) for a given list must be the counting numbers in their usual order (or some initial segment thereof), whereas the index set for a tuple, generally speaking, might be any set whatsoever. The most general Type for Objects whose subtypes are abstract - intangible - things that do not have mass. Note that AbstractEntity is not a subtype of AbstractObject - the name 'Abstract' is retained for alignment with other ontologies. NOTE in particular that AbstractEntity is not disjoint from MentalObject, which may be created by people in space and time, and hae a location in space and time. The kind of abstract things that do not have a locaiton in space and time are under 'AbstrctObject' in COSMO. COSMO Note: the notion of 'Abstract' has historically been somewhat vague. It is often defined by saying that it represents things 'not located in space or time' - but then subclasses are defined which are clearly mental constructs with a defined creation time (e.g. musical compositions) - which means that they must indeed be located in time and space. In this ontology we distinguish 'Abstract' things from 'MentalObjects' - the latter are things created by IntelligentAgents (people) that have no mass, and therefore would traditionally be categorized as 'Abstract'. 'AbstractObject' here is used mostly to categorize mathematical things such as numbers, which arguably do not depend on intelligent entities for their existence. But 'AbstractEntities" and 'MentalObjects' are not considered disjoint here, so there is room for people to argue whether mathematical concepts are created or merely discovered by mathematicians - we take no position on that issue. An AbstractObject is an entity which does not exist in space or time. This is more stringnent than merely not having mass, the criterion for belinging to 'AbstractEntity. This category is mostly for mathematical concepts. Under 'AbstractEntity' we also have 'MentalObjects', which do exist in space and time. COSMO Note: the notion of 'Abstract' has historically been somewhat vague. It is often defined by saying that it represents things 'not located in space or time' - but then subclasses are defined which are clearly mental constructs with a defined creation time (e.g. musical compositions) - which means that they must indeed be located in time and space. In this ontology we distinguish generically 'Abstract' things from 'MentalObjects' - the latter are things created by IntelligentAgents (people) that have no mass, and therefore would traditionally be categorized as 'Abstract'. 'AbstractObject' here is used mostly to categorize mathematical things such as numbers, which arguably do not depend on intelligent entities for their existence. But 'AbstractEntities" and 'MentalObjects' are not considered disjoint here, so there is room for people to argue whether mathematical concepts are created or merely discovered by mathematicians - we take no position on that issue. See the note under 'AbstractEntity' to see how 'Abstract' is used in this ontology. The current (20061027) arrangement here is provisional, keeping some of the terminology from Cyc and SUMO for alignment - but it may be changed slightly in the future in a way that will not affect inferencing. Intangible_Cyc__Abstract_SUMO__abstract_object_ISO15926 ISO15926 An Abstract-object is a thing that does not exist in space-time. (COSMO note - this is not the interpretation in COSMO - MentalObjects are abstract, but they do 'exist' in our ordinary space and time.) SUMO: Abstract : Properties or qualities as distinguished from any particular embodiment of the properties/qualities in a physical medium. Instances of Abstract can be said to exist in the same sense as mathematical objects such as sets and relations, but they cannot exist at a particular place and time without some physical encoding or embodiment. #$Intangible: OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002 The collection of things that are not physical - are not made of, or encoded in, matter. Every #$Collection is an #$Intangible (even if its instances are tangible), and so are some #$Individuals. Caution: do not confuse 'tangibility' with 'perceivability' - humans can perceive light even though it's intangible--at least in a sense. For more on this issue, see the relevant #$cyclistNotes. Intangible[Cyc]%Abstract[SUMO]%abstract_object[ISO15926] The collection of #$Intangible things that are intrinsically mathematical (see #$MathematicalThing) or computational (see #$ComputationalObject). Instances of #$MathematicalOrComputationalThing are abstract in the very strong sense of being nonspatial, atemporal, and massless. Examples include numbers, sets, collections, relations, algorithms, and abstract character strings. bd58e31f-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A specialization of #$MathematicalOrComputationalThing. Each instance of #$MathematicalThing is an atemporal, nonspatial, purely mathematical thing. #$MathematicalThing is partitioned into two main specializations, #$MathematicalObject and #$SetOrCollection (qq.v). bd58e5b6-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A specialization of both #$MathematicalThing and #$IntangibleIndividual. Each instance of #$MathematicalObject is a purely abstract mathematical thing which is also an individual (see #$Individual). Specializations of #$MathematicalObject include #$Quantifier, #$RealNumber, #$Triangle, and #$TruthValue. Note that instances of #$SetOrCollection are not instances of #$MathematicalObject, since they are not instances of #$Individual. bf461f37-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A specialization of both #$MathematicalObject and #$StructuredInformationSource. Each instance of #$Tuple is a complex consisting of one or more indexed (and possibly ordered) components; it might be a single, a pair, a triple, or so on; and the components might be things of any sort whatsoever (see #$memberOfTuple). For example, a specialization of #$Tuple is #$NTupleOfIntervals (q.v.), whose instances are tuples consisting exclusively of #$ScalarIntervals (q.v.); e.g. complex numbers and physical vectors are n-tuple-intervals. Another specialization of #$Tuple is #$List (q.v.), whose instances are ordered. Each tuple has an associated index set : the set of things that serve (via an associated indexing function ) to index or individually represent the tuple's members (see #$tupleIndexSet and #$tupleMemberIndex). If the index set for a given tuple is the set of positive integers (or an initial segment thereof), then the integers' usual ordering serves to order the tuple's components, and the tuple is in fact an _ordered_n-tuple_, i.e. it is a #$List. But in general any set (e.g. the column names in a relational database) may be used to index the components of a tuple. bd58f8d8-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 connected_spatiotemporal_region BFO Definition: A space time region that has temporal and spatial dimensions such that all points within the spatiotemporal region are mediately or immediately connected to all other points within the same space time region. Examples: the spatial and temporal location of an individual organism's life, the spatial and temporal location of the development of a fetus. @ToDo: COSMO note: in COSMO, the type TimePoint (instant) is a subtype of TimeInterval, whereas in BFO interval and instant are disjoint. The BFO interval, therefore must be a non-zero length. For simplicity, COSMO does not yet have a non-zero-length instant (no need yet), and when that is added the BFO 'SpatiotemporalInterval' neeeds to be equated with the non-zero-length interval, and the subtype relation of 'SpatiotemporalInstant' and 'SpatiotemporalInterval' must be removed.. BFO Definition: A space time region that has spatial and temporal dimensions and every spatial and temporal point of which is not connected with every other spatial and temporal point of which. Examples: the space and time occupied by the individual games of the World Cup, the space and time occupied by the individual liaisons in a romantic affair. scattered_spatiotemporal_region Definition: A connected space time region at a specific moment. Examples: the space time region occupied by a single instantaneous temporal slice (part) of a process. COSMO note: It is unclear why this is not identical to a region of space at some particular moment. spatiotemporal_instant COSMO note: in COSMO instants are not disjoint from intervals, they are merely the limiting case of intervals of zero lenght. A 'proper interval' is a legitimate concept, but would just be superfluos in COSMO, so this Type will include proper intervals and instants. BFO Definition: A connected space time region that endures for more than a single moment of time. BFO Examples: the space time region occupied by a process or by a fiat processual part spatiotemporal_interval A specialization of the 'starts' relation which points from a TemporalThing (TimeInterval or Event) to the TimePoint at which that TemporalThing started.. A specialization of the 'finishes' relation which points from a TemporalThing (TimeInterval or Event) to the TimePoint at which that TemporalThing ended. takesValue relates an AttributeType to the AttributeValues that instantiate the AttributeType. For example, the AttribugeType Length will be instantiated by an the type 'LengthMeasure'. This relation is similar to the 'instance' relation, but is specific to the relationship between AttributeTypes and AttributeValues, used to implement the specfici method of representing attributes that is adopted for COSMO.. The inverse of 'takesValue'. A pointer from a concept to another concept of which it is a synonym. This is a crude method to permit search in Protege for synonyms of terms in the class search window. In v0.3 these synonyms were confined to classes. For other synoyms, use 'hasSynonym'. wasCreatedBySoleAgent relates an Artifact (concrete or abstract) to the individual Agent who created it. The Agent may be a Group, but there will be only one value for this relation, and to fill that value means that one knows the identity of all of the agents who participated enough in the creation to be called creators. This is not necessarily the same as an autor of record for a textual work, where ghost writers may get no credit. This is the real creator. hasAttributeValue relates an Object or Substance or Event to some AttributeValue which the Object may have. Each AttributeValue will be a value for at least one AttributeType, but this relation does not specify the AttributeType. For cases where an AttributeValue may measure more than one AttributeType (such as LengthMeasure, which can specify length, width, height, altitude, distance, etc.), using this relation may leave ambiguity as to its precise meaning. COSMO Note: AttributeValues may be either classes (instances of AttributeValueType), or instances of AttributeValue. This allows one to express an attribute as a region (e.g. colors will bw classes, not instances, to permit subclassing), or for quantitative measures as instances (e.g. '25 feet'). For quantitative measures, the representation of measurements as classes would be conceptually permissible (the class representing the set of possible values, determined by the measured value and possible error), or as instances of measure to which an uncertainty value has been attached. The specific subrelations (subproperties, in OWL) of 'hasAttributeValue' will in some cases have their range restricted to AttributeValueType of AttributeValue. isAnAttributeValueOf is the inverse of 'hasAttributeValue'. This relation will be used explicitly only in special cases where particular AttributeValues are appropriately applied only to specific types of things. isaPartOf is a very general 'part' relation applicable to spatial regions or objects in some space. This relation has no axioms associated with it because it is only an 'umbrella' relation that gathers together other relations having different meaning, so as to provide an anchor point for the ambiguous linguistic notion of 'part' It cannot be transitive, because it subsumes the relation of a member to the group, which is not transitive. But some of its subrelations are transitive. NOTE: this and its subproperties are usually instance-level relations, but types are included because they are used in some of the subrelations. To express that some physical object type is typically a part of another physical object type, use the type-level relation, 'isTypicallyaPhysicalPartOf' the inverse of 'isaPartOf', a very general relation applicable to spatial regions, events, or objects in some space. hasRepresentation is the most general relation that points from some concept or thing - of any type - to another thing (abstract or physical) that represents it in some way. This relation will be used, if at all, less frequently than the more specific 'representation' relations, and may be useful primarily to collect those more specific relations in one location to make the representation relations easier to understand. The related relation 'hasURL' points to a datatype string that is the address of some file relevant to the subject entity. As a datatype relation, hasAbstractRepresentation relates some entity - concrete or abstract - to a MentalObject that represents - or contains a part that represents - that entity. The mental object is itself abstract in the sense of having no mass. A common example of an abstract representation is the word (string of characters) 'cat', representing a small furry animal. NOTE that an AbstractRepresentation (such as an AbstractImage) of a person will contain an abstract representation of that person, but may also contain (and thus be, in this sense) an abstract representation of the clothing or accessories that person is wearing, or of the chair s/he is sitting in, or of the cat next in his/her lap, or of anything else in that image. NOTE also that, just as the representation pointed to by this relation may only have a part that actually represents the subject matter (other parts may represent other subject matters), the subject of the inverse relation 'isanAbstractRepresentationOf' may only have a part that is the representation of the object of that relation. points from an abstract representation (for example, an AbstractString or AbstractImage) of something to that thing it represents. The abstract string 'the cat' could point to a specific instance of a cat A DateTimeExtendedGroup string would point to a TimeInterval. hasComponentElement relates a Group to the individual elements of which the group consists. Any entity can be aggregated with another entity to form a conceptual Group. NOTE: this 'element' is not the chemical 'element'! See also the specializations of this relation, for OrderedGroups, indicating the location in the OrderedGroup of a particular element. See 'hasFirstElement' and 'hasSecondElement'. isaComponentElementOf relates some entity to a Group of which it is a member. It is the inverse of 'hasComponentElement'. Since Groups are not defined arbitrarily, and seldom defined automatically, this relation will typically be used only when it makes sense to do so. For example, one may define a Group of 'attendees' of some particular meeting. Then to say that a Person is a member of that Group would allow inference that that Person was in a particular place at a particular time.. hasFirstElement is a specialization of the relation 'hasComponentElement' applying to OrderedGroups or Lists, specifying the first component element of the OrderedGroup or List. hasSecondElement is a specialization of the relation 'hasComponentElement' applying to OrderedGroups, specifying the Second component element of an OrderedGroup. hasThirdElement is a specialization of the relation 'hasComponentElement' applying to OrderedGroups, specifying the Third component element of an OrderedGroup. hasCardinalty relates a Group to an integer enumerating the number of direct component elements of which the group consists. Because an element of a Group may itself be a Group, the Cardinality does not indicate the number of things that ultimately are not Groups, only the number of things that are related by the 'hasComponentElement' relation. NOTE that AbstractString is included explicitly, not only as a subtype of Group, because zero-length (zero-cardinality, considered as though it were an ordered group) strings may exist but zero-cardinality Groups are not permitted. hasMassInGrams relates an Object to its mass measured in grams. This is a shortcut to using more general functional mass measures, and is used here only for illustration, to permit some specifics in instances. The values given should be taken as crude estimates (order of magnitude estimates, possible error over 100%), particularly since no time interval is given by this relation. Relations expressing more exact values of mass have not yet (v0.45) been written in COSMO. This is mostly a placeholder for more meaningful relations. NOTE: for objects whose mass is unknown, a value of '-1' will serve as the code for 'unknown mass'. Since, as of v0.49, a mass value is required in COSMO for PhysicalObjects (mass is the characteristic property of PhysicalObjects), an explicit value must be provided even if it is unknown. If an approximate value can be guessed within +- 100% (as with human weights),a value should be entered so that the reasoner will have some information with which to make inferences. For example, a car mass of 1,000,000 grams (one ton) will allow the reasoner to infer 'too heavy for a person to lift'. Globally unique identifier, fromOpenCyc 0.78. NOTE that this is a formatted string having 32 alphanumberic characters with embedded hyphens, though it is represented (temporarily) as a simple string here. Another form of 'unique identifier' has 16 characters, and is represented in COSMO as an AbstractString which is a subtype of Identifier. See 'UniqueIdentifier16' Globally Unique ID Each instance of String-Entity relation is an ObjectProperty that can be translated into a String type attribute when converting from an OWL ontology to a schema, UML model, or other representation that uses String datatypes to refer to property values that are best represented as first-class entities in an ontology. This OWL Property type is specifically designed to assist translation of ontologies into other formats. Each instance of 'dbMappedRelation' is a OWL Property that can be mapped to one or more columns in a database when using an OWL ontology to access conceptual information from one or more database tables. Each instance of 'CompactedTernaryRelation' is a OWL Property that could be represented by a ternary relation in an FOL format, but has been compacted to fit into the binary relation format of OWL. The range of these relations will be instances of a type that specifies the two arguments that are folded into a single argument to fit into an OWL relation. Each instance of 'ExistentialRelation' is a relation between types of entities, rather than between instances of entities; a relation is specified as being of the type 'ExistentialRelation' when the intended meaning is that every instance of the subject is related to *some* instance of the object. This meaning could also be expressed by an OWL restriction using 'someValuesFrom'; however, the OWL restriction will be interpeted logically as being an inconsistency if no instance satisfying that relation is present in the ontology for every instance of the subject. It may not be necessary or desirable to create instances of the object every time an instance of the subject of a relation is created - and yet, we will want the reasoner to know, when it needs to, that some instance of the object type must exist. This formalism is adopted to allow an explicit assertion within the ontology that certain instances are implied by others, but to allow the reasoner to ignore that information unless it is required. So relations between types that imply the existence of an instance of the object for every instance of the subject will be made instances of 'ExistentialRelation'. Use of such information will require an FOL reasoner, but COSMO is intended to represent all information in the OWL format, in such a way tat it can be converted to an FOL format for more detailed reasoning. Whether and how this represented information will be used will be up to the implementation. The task of the ontology is to represent that information, and this provides a means to do so without overburdening the reasoner. There will also be relations between types (as for example subclasses of PhysicalSubstance or of AttributeValue) for which there is no implication of the existence of instances of the object type. These relations will not be instances of 'ExistentialRelation'. Each instance of 'dbMappedDataRelation' is a OWL Property that can be mapped to some datatype column in a database when using an OWL ontology to access conceptual information from one or more database tables. consistsMostlyOfSubstance relates physical objects or physical object types that have a relatively homogeneous spatial distribution of component substances to the substance(s) which form the dominant composition. If the component substance does not form a larger weight fraction than any other substance, the relation 'hasConstituentSubstance' should be used instead. Thus a drinking glass will be composed of glass, a lake of water, a structural I-beam of steel. In Cyc the 'substances' (or stuffs) were represented as objects made of a particular substance. In COSMO we distinguish the object from its composition, and this relation specifies, where it makes sense to do so, what the substance composition of particular objects is. hasColor relates abstract symbols (abstract representations of things), substances, substance types, or individual objects to one or more colors that characterize the way that light is reflected from or passes through the object. For real-world objects, the color value will be a color region, which could be further restricted to a more specific color, down to a monochromatic color of specific saturation and intensity. The colors are represented as Types. A SolidObject is a PhysicalObject that retains its shape with less than 30% distortion in any one dimension when placed on a surface in air *or in water* in Earth's gravitational field. This means that reasonably solid but compressible gels qualify as SolidObjects. For objects that are less distortable than gels, use 'RigidObject'. NOTE that a SolidObject does not have to be rigid. All Organisms are SolidObjects, even jellyfish. To be solid, and object may distort, but cannot flow as a liquid or disperse as a gas. Eacj 'ObjectConsistingOfSubstance' is a PhysicalObject that is characterized, among other things, by the substance of which it consists. A DynamicObject is a PhysicalObject for which the internal movement of the whole or some part is an essential characteristic of its identity. A tornado, a whirlpool, or a dust devil are examples. This does not include microscopic movements such as biological processes, therefore living things are not instances. NOTE that simple linear moving things like currents are represented as FunctionalProcesses, even though they have some of the character of a DynamicObject. A current of water is not an instance of DynamicObject. This distinction is not entirely arbitrary; a linear current has a flow rate as one of its salient characteristics, and that is representd as a time derivative, which is one salient characteristic of a FunctionalProcess. A DynamicObject will exhibit salient characteristics beyond a simple linear flow, as in the case of a tornado which moves up, down, and sideways as well as in a circle. Dry is an attribute of objects and substances that do not lose enough liquid by vaporization on standing in an open space so as to cause a significant change in their properties. This is an Attribute that can be used to reason about the likely stability of an Object or substance on standing in the open.. A DryObject is a SolidObject that does not have a significant content of a liquid that may volatilize so as to significantly change the weight (by more than 10%) or rigidity or functionality after standing in an open space for some time. The category is determined by the moisture contnet considered as such at the time it was created. RigidObjects that have some surface mosture are still DryObjects. This type is created to allow a reasoner to infer some commonsense information about the consequences of aging of an object. The disjoint alternative is 'MoistObject', which includes objects such as animals and some foods, which change substantially when left in a place where the water content can evaporate without replacement. NOTE that this type applies to types that were dry when they were created: an Organism is a MoiopstObject, but when it reaches the stage where it is a dry skeleton, it becomes a physically dry object, but is still an instance of MoistObject. This type represents a property that is relevant to stability, not necessarily representing the physical character throughout a lifetime. A MoistObject is a SolidObject that has a significant content of a liquid that may volatilize so as to significantly change the weight (by more than 10%) or rigidity or functionality after standing in an open space for some time. This criterion is applied in reference to the state of the object at the time it was created. A MoistObject that has dried out may still be an instance of the type MoistObject. This type represents a property that is relevant to stability, not necessarily representing the physical character throughout a lifetime. This type is created to allow a reasoner to infer some commonsense information about the consequences of aging of an object. The disjoint alternative is 'DryObject', which includes all RigidObjects and objects such as sheets of metal or cloth, which are more stable to standing in an open space than a MoistObject would be. Examples of moist objects would be an organism, fresh bread or cake, or . An AgentiveObject is a PhysicalObject that can cause changes to other objects. This class contains subclasses that have the capacity to act as agents, i.e. to cause changes in the real world; but this general class of agents do not have to have intentions or form plans.. People are the Agents that are typically of greatest interest. But Tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanoes, etc. can behave a agents in that they cause external events due to their internal processes. All of these agentic objects are included in this category, but Organizations, which are classified as MentalObjects in this ontology, are in a separate agentive category. Life Form is very general catgory of organic objects tht can reproduce themselves in a manner resembling the reproduction of animals and plants, and includes intact organisms, viruses, and prions. A part of an organism is not a life form in itself. NOTE also that 'LifeForm' is not disjoint with 'InanimateThing' though 'Organism' is. This is because some primitive life forms, like some viruses, can occur in crystalline form (while still being viable), and we have categorized crystals as inanimate. The border between living and non-living at the subcellular level is fuzzy, and in COSMO (rev639) we are still trying to find the proper distinctions. COSMO note: all PhysicalObjects are non-trivially continuous only with respect to some level of granularity. Cyc: A specialization of #$SpatialThing. For every instance REGION of #$SpatiallyContinuousThing, any two points it subsumes are connected by some path it also subsumes. Positive exemplars include a drinking glass, a haystack, a spiderweb, or a region of space in the shape of any of these things. If the glass is broken and its pieces no longer touch each other, it is not a #$SpatiallyContinuousThing. Some borderline exemplars depend on granularity. At a macroscopic level of granularity, a dense cloud of smoke is effectively continuous. On the microscopic level, it is composed of independent particles that do not touch each other. 9ae4ab12-8221-41d7-9022-96b38c86ffc1 A specialization of #$InanimateThing-Natural. Each instance of #$Mineral is a piece of homogeneous inorganic physical substance that has a crystalline structure. Specializations of #$Mineral include the collections #$Diamond, #$Turquoise-Gem, #$Jade-Gem, and #$Corundum. c1008900-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 COSMO note: In COSMO, this is a substance, not an object. There are some inorganic materials, such as carbon dioxide and carbon tetrachloride, that contain carbon. So carbon content is not the only criterion to distinguish organic from inorganic substances. Cyc: A specialization of #$InanimateThing. Each instance of #$InorganicMaterial is a tangible thing wholly composed of one or more types of inorganic molecule. Instances of #$InorganicMaterial usually didn't originate as parts or products of living things. Notable specializations of #$InorganicMaterial include #$Mineral, #$Metal, and #$Glass. bd590a05-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A PhysicalSubstance that is in a solid and usually crystalline form, and inorganic (possibly except for some small amount of included organic material), In COSMO this is a Substance, not an Object, whereas the Cyc term is an Object. This is the solid substance: when molten it is not considered 'Mineral' in COSMO. Cyc: A specialization of #$InanimateThing-Natural. Each instance of #$Mineral is a piece of homogeneous inorganic physical substance that has a crystalline structure. Specializations of #$Mineral include the collections #$Diamond, #$Turquoise-Gem, #$Jade-Gem, and #$Corundum. SUMO: Any of various naturally occurring homogeneous substances (such as stone, coal, salt, sulfur, sand, petroleum), or synthetic substances having the chemical composition and crystalline form and properties of a naturally occurring mineral. c1008900-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 An important specialization of #$InanimateThing. Each instance of #$ExanimateThing is an individual that is typically regarded as truly inanimate, or non-agentive in the sense that it is utterly incapable of any subjective or mental experience. c0d2c2fb-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 COSMO note: in COSMO, a SubatomicParticle is not an instance of this type. This type partly overlaps with 'Particle' - the distinction is not resolved as of v0.51. This should be used for objects down to atom-sized. Cyc: A specialization of #$PartiallyTangible. Each instance of #$MicroscopicScaleObject is a partially tangible object which is so small that human beings cannot perceive it, except (perhaps) with the use of special devices such as #$Microscopes or #$ElectronMicroscopes. Specializations of #$MicroscopicScaleObject include #$Molecule, #$Atom, #$SubAtomicParticle, #$Chloroplast, and #$Mitochondrion. bd5891ac-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A specialization of #$MicroscopicScaleObject. Each instance of #$ChemicalObject is an object whose behavior is typically described in terms of its outer cloud of #$Electrons. Specializations of #$ChemicalObject include the collections #$Atom, #$Molecule, and #$Ion. bd58916a-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A specialization of #$ChemicalObject. Each instance of #$Atom is a microscopic-scale object with exactly one atomic nucleus (see #$AtomicNucleus) and some number of electrons (see #$Electron). A typical instance of #$Atom has no net charge, i.e., it has as many instances of #$Electron as it does of #$Proton. For the collection of atoms that do have non-zero charges, see #$MonoatomicIon. bd5891ef-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A substance which is a chemical element, for which the unit is an atom; each atom of a ChemicalElement has the same number of protons in its nucleus. In Cyc called 'ElementStuff' Cyc: An instance of #$TangibleStuffCompositionType and a specialization of #$InanimateThing. Each instance of #$ElementStuff is a piece of tangible stuff, composed of a quantity of atoms, all of which are of the same chemical element. That is, every atom in a given piece of #$ElementStuff has the same number of protons in its atomic nucleus. For example, all pieces of carbon (i.e. all instances of #$Carbon) are instances of #$ElementStuff. On the other hand, instances of #$Water, because they are all constituted of both #$Hydrogen and #$Oxygen atoms, do not belong to the collection #$ElementStuff. bd5908b9-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 a metaclass used as the Type restriction on certain relations that take subclasses of ChemicallyDefinedSubstance as their argument. Cyc: A collection of collections and a specialization of #$TangibleStuffCompositionType. Each instance of #$ChemicalSubstanceType is a specialization of #$PartiallyTangible whose instances are defined _only_ by their chemical composition - not by their physical state or any other property. Instances of #$ChemicalSubstanceType can be of two varieties: (1) Collections whose instances are completely uniform with each other in terms of chemical composition; this includes (a) the chemical elements - such as #$Carbon, #$Oxygen, and #$Hydrogen - which are instances of #$ElementStuffTypeByNumberOfProtons (thus, the latter is a specialization of #$ChemicalSubstanceType), and (b) chemical compounds constituted of more than one substance chemically bonded, e.g., #$Water, #$Caffeine, and #$IronOxide, which are instances of #$ChemicalCompoundTypeByChemicalSpecies (2) Substances which have a general chemical specification, that is, whose instances do not have exactly the same chemical composition but fall within certain specifications, e.g., #$DNAStuff. Note that collections that are _not_ instances of #$ChemicalSubstanceType include collections of substances which have some component which is of overriding significance in some context, so that in everyday language such substances are frequently referred to by the name of their important component (e.g., penicillin applied to a tablet containing penicillin), but which have significant admixtures of other substances. Thus, #$Penicillin is an instance of #$ChemicalSubstanceType, but the collection of tablets containing penicillin and including other ingredients is not. Also, specializations of #$Mixture, such as #$Lemonade, are _not_ instances of #$ChemicalSubstanceType, because mixtures are determined by their physical state rather than solely by their chemical composition. bd58cd95-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 COSMO note: In Cyc, where there was no taxonomic distinction between substances and objects, this metatype was used to label both substances (in some particular form) and objects. In COSMO, this is used as a parent class for certain substances having particular forms. These categories can serve as ?X in the phrase 'given as an ?X' in pharmacy descriptions. Cyc comment: Drug products organized according to their form when they are given as doses. c10ae97e-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 Each class of a ColorAttribute forms a region with more specific classes of ColorAttribute forming subregions.. Each class of a ColorAttribute forms a region with more specific classes of ColorAttribute forming subregions.. ElementType is a metatype which is a specialization of the Protege owl:Class that can serve as type for physical substances and an argument restriction for the relation s on chemical elments. This is a primitive mechanism to accommodate OWL limitations on relation arguments. hasProtonCount relates a chemical element to the number of protons in each atomic nucleus of that element. This is very specifically a chemistry/physics concept. NOTE that the domain is ElementType because elements are represented as types (classes), not instances. This representation permits element isotopes to be subtypes of each element. hasConstituentSubstance relates physical objects or regions to the substance(s) which form some part of the composition of the object or region. The component substance pointed to in this relation does not have to be the main component, and the object does not have to have a uniform distribution of substance types. If the component substance does form a larger weight fraction than any other substance, the relation 'consistsMostlyOfSubstance' should be used instead. One could say that a {shovel hasConstituentSubstance Steel}, even if the handle is wooden. We can use a relation which also specifies the actual weight fraction of each substance, but such a relation would be ternary, and cannot be directly supported as an OWL 'property'. NOTE that In Cyc the 'substances' (or stuffs) were represented as objects made of a particular substance. In COSMO we distinguish the object from its composition, and this relation specifies, where it makes sense to do so, what the substance compostion of particular objects is. NOTE that this relation is a subProperty of the generic 'hasPart' relation. The 'hasPart' relation has no implications, and is used only as an umbrella to collect all the 'part' relations that may ber used in language. The notion of a substance being a 'part' of an object may be the least common use of 'part', but it is found, and this subproperty relation allows it to be used in this ontology. The inverse of 'hasConstituentSubstance'. The element with six protons in each nucleus. 6 The element with eight protons in each nucleus. 8 Each subclass of LiquidSubstance labels a PhysicalSubstance which is liquid at normal temperatures and pressures. This category has been set as identical to the Cyc 'Liquid-StateOfMatter', though the original Cyc category is a physical object. This redefinition was done as part of the disentanglement of Cyc substances and objects. The Cyc category definition does not apply to this Type,and is closer to the COSMO 'LiquidObject'. The Cyc category was reinterpreted as a substance because it was used in Cyc predominantly as a parent class for what in COSMO are considered as substances. Water, gasoline, and vodka are examples. Although most substances are classified mainly by their composition, and may be solids or liquids (and sometimes gases) depending on temperature, there are some categories of substances that are conceptually in one state; ice is an example - it must be solid. A 'BathOil' must be a liquid. A LiquidSubstance is a PhysicalSubstance that must be liquid, at normal temperature and pressure. Any PhysicalSubstance in the Gaseous form, at room temperature and atmospheric pressure. A quantity of gas does not have a defined volume, but will expand to become uniformly distributed throughout its container. NOTE that a substance that happens to be gaseous at some elevated temperature is **not** necessarily a subtype of 'Gas'; likewise, a quantity of cooled or compressed gas that has become liquid due to cooling or compression can still be composed of a subtype of 'Gas' - for example Liquified Natural Gas. To classify a quantity of matter that is in the gaseous form, use 'GaseousObject'. This is equivalent to saying that it has the property of being 'gaseous' - but that property is not yet (v 0.45) defined in COSMO. At low enough temperature, all substances condense to a liquid or solid. A ChemicallyDefinedSubstance is a PhysicalSubstance that is defined by its chemical composition. The specialized types will have a relatively well-defined composition, though the higher level catagories may have significant variation in the exact chemical composition, such as 'Rubber' or 'Alloy'. Substances that are commonly thnought of as relatively defined, even though they are mixtures such as Ivory and gemstone substances, are also subtypes of this Type. In Cyc labeled 'TangibleStuffCompositionType'. Cyc: A collection of collections and a specialization of #$ExistingStuffType. Instances are subcollections of #$PartiallyTangible whose membership is based only on the physical and/or chemical composition of their instances. #$TangibleStuffCompositionType does not have as instances collections whose instances are determined _solely_ by the physical state they are in - for that, see #$TangibleStuffStateType. However, many substances that chemically break down before melting (e.g. #$FattyTissue) _are_ included in this collection, even though they exist solely in one physical state. The collection #$Water is an instance of #$TangibleStuffCompositionType, as instances of #$Water are all pieces of substance with the chemical composition H20. On the other hand , the collection of all pieces of ice (i.e. (#$SolidFn #$Water)) is not a #$TangibleStuffCompositionType, because membership in that collection depends on the substance's composition _and_ on its physical state. #$TalcumPowder is not an instance of this collection because a fused mass of the substance would no longer be powder, but would still be of the same #$TangibleStuffCompositionType. Further instances of #$TangibleStuffCompositionType are #$Nylon, #$GasolineFuel, #$FattyTissue, #$Nitrogen, and #$Glass. An important specialization of this collection is #$ChemicalSubstanceType - those substance types defined solely by their chemical formulae. bd58864a-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 hasChemicalComposition specifies the proportion of elements in a ChemicallyDefinedSubstance. The range is an AbstractString, but the string is restricted in that the alphabetical parts must be ligitimate chemical symbols for elements. This relation includes not only ChemicalFormulas, which specify the number of atoms in each molecule (or balanced ion group for ionic materials), but also proportions of atoms in organic substances such as biopolymers, where the numbers behind each element may be fractional, representing an average over several closely related molecules or an average in a large molecule. However, percent compositions, specified as percentages, cannot be represented using this relation. hasChemicalFormula specifies the number of atoms in each unit (molecule or repeating balanced ion group) of each element in a ChemicallyDefinedSubstance that is not considered as a mixture of substances. The range is an AbstractString, but the string is restricted in that the alphabetical parts must be legitimate chemical symbols for elements, and the numbers after each element symbol must be an integer. For macromolecules, only those whose true molecular formula is known can have a formula pointed to by this relation. A simple grouping is permitted to express some structure: a hyphen represents a single bond between atom groups, as in 'NH2-CO-NH2' for Urea, or '-COOH' represents a carboxyl group. To specify a name that is not a ChemicalFormula, use 'hasChemicalname'. a metatype that can be used as an argument restriction for relations that take a subtype of Context as one of their arguments. IT can also be used for types for which namespace prefixes would be convenient to label the instances, such as 'AtomicSymbol'.. The ontology name of each NamespacePrefix can serve as a string designating a Namespace, and each such string must be unique within the ontology so that the ontology can recognize and reason about Contexts such as Namespaces. A NamespacePrefix will concatenate with an underscore and any other names or prefixes to uniquely identify (within any ontology) entities such as codes, databses, databse tables, database columns,etc. No entity name in the ontology that is not intended to relate to the databsse or code symbolized by the rpefix should begin its name with that prefix followed by an underscore. It should be unquestioned that any specified prefix, followed by an underscore and other characters, represents som eentity within the context symbolized by that namespace prefix. hasNamespacePrefix Specifies an entity whose ontology identifier can serve as a string which constitutes a unique namespace prefix to be used to make unique identifiers for entities in the ontology. By making the NamespacePrefixes into first-class entities in the ontology, the internal ontology uniqueness function can serve as a check that each NamespacePrefix is unique.. The prefix used for the chemical symbols of elements and compounds (i.e. chemical formulas, which are not necessarily unique for each compound). The chemical symbol for Ethyl alcohol, for example, can be represented as 'CHEM_C2H5OH' or 'CHEM_C2H6O', though the former contains more information; and water would be 'CHEM_H2O'. Elements that have symbols similar to other words can be unambiguosly represented this way, such as 'CHEM_At' for Astatine. An AbstractString representing the atomic composition for well-defined substances, in which each atomic symbol in the String is followed by an integer, or another atomic symbol (implying the integer '1'). Chemical formulas should use the 'CHEM_' namespace prefix, so as to minimize ambiguity, even if the bare formula appears unambiguous. A collection of collections and a specialization of #$ChemicalSubstanceType. Each instance of #$ChemicalCompoundTypeByChemicalSpecies is a specialization of #$PartiallyTangible whose instances are defined _only_ by their chemical composition - not by their physical state or any other property. Instances of #$ChemicalCompoundTypeByChemicalSpecies are collections whose instances are completely uniform with each other in terms of chemical structure, e.g., #$Water, #$Caffeine, and #$IronOxide. This collection does not include the chemical elements - such as #$Carbon and #$Oxygen, since there can be multiple types that molecules can be formed out of a single element, e.g. O2 and #$Ozone. Use the broader collection, #$ChemicalSubstanceType, for substances which have a general chemical specification, that is, whose instances do not have exactly the same chemical composition but fall within certain specifications, e.g., #$DNAStuff. bd40a83e-da13-41d6-9955-dc363ad8ec02 . hasComponentSubstance is used to specify that some particular substance necessarily contains within it a component which is another substance. This is very broad, and can be used to specify multiple heterogeneous types of substance components, such as mixtures, pure chemicals, or elements. Thus we can say that blood contains protein, or that protein contains nitrogen. In addition to substances that are composed of whole molecules, we also permit representation of 'Substances' that are parts of molecules, such as 'phosphateGroup'. The latter type of substance will be represented by the Cyc 'MolecularComponent'. >> This relation is transitive. In order to specify a relation that points only to some primary component(s) (e.g. a polymer contains a unique type of monomer unit), a relation that is not a subrelation of this one must be defined. hasMainComponentSubstance is used to specify that some particular substance necessarily contains within it a dominant component which is another substance. The 'Main Component' substance pointed to will not necessarily be more than 50% of the total, but it will usually be percentage-wise greater than the other Substance components, and in rare cases (such as concentrated solutions of highly soluble solids) when another substance is of greater percentage weight, it should contribute significantly to the properties of the whole Substance; this is the case in some solutions, where the solvent will be pointed to by this relation, even though the solvent will occasionally not be the main constituent by weight. An example of this relation would be to point to Gold as the 'main compnent substance' even for 10-karat gold, where the Gold is less than 50% of the total weight of the Substance, but is the most salient component in terms of properties. For the case when a Substance has some significant properties that characterize a mixture, but may not necessarily be a significant fraction of the weight, the relation 'hasMainActiveIngredient' should be used. The compound with one carbon and two oxygens in each molecule - CO2. COSMO note: This is similar to the Cyc concept 'OrganicMaterial' but has been reinterpreted in COSMO as a substance, not an object. Also, in COSMO cellular substances suc as animal and vegetable materials are subtypes of OrganicSubstance, even though they contain up to 80% by weight of water. So it is not necessary that a substance be composed mostly of organic chemicals to qualify as an 'OrganicSubstance', but the organic compoounds should comprise most of the non-solvent portion of the substance.. Other than the object/substance distinction, it is close to 'OrganicMaterial', but whether there is any useful distinction has not been resolved as of COSMO version 0.48. For ***objects*** that are composed predomintly from stuff derived from living things, see 'OrganicObject'. NOTE that an OrganicSubstance can be complex, and can include inorganic substances such as water. For substances composed predominantly of organic chemicals, use 'OrganicCompound' COSMO: An OrganicSubstance is a PhysicalSubstance (not an Object) whose molecules (other than inert solvent such as water) are composed predominantly of carbon atoms bonded directly either to other carbon atoms or to hydrogen atoms. Many other elements may occur in organic substances, especially oxygen and nitrogen, but the dominant molecules should each have at least one of either a carbon-carbon or carbon-hydrogen bond. Cyc: A collection of tangible things. Each instance of #$OrganicMaterial is a tangible thing composed of one or more types of organic #$Molecule. Instances of #$OrganicMaterial usually have their origin in the bodies (or other products) of living things. Since some organic substances can be synthesized, #$OrganicMaterial is not a subcollection of #$NaturalTangibleStuff. Chemically, instances of #$OrganicMaterial have fairly (or very) complex carbon-based structures. Examples include all instances of the collections #$Oil, #$DNAStuff, #$Alcohol-Compound, #$Ivory, and #$AnimalBodyPart. bd58c3d0-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 In Cyc, named 'OrganicMaterial'. This can be a solid or liquid, and can be an object composed of complex material from a living thing, or an organic chemical of defined composition. Cyc: A collection of tangible things. Each instance of #$OrganicMaterial is a tangible thing composed of one or more types of organic #$Molecule. Instances of #$OrganicMaterial usually have their origin in the bodies (or other products) of living things. Since some organic substances can be synthesized, #$OrganicMaterial is not a subcollection of #$NaturalTangibleStuff. Chemically, instances of #$OrganicMaterial have fairly (or very) complex carbon-based structures. Examples include all instances of the collections #$Oil, #$DNAStuff, #$Alcohol-Compound, #$Ivory, and #$AnimalBodyPart. bd58c3d0-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 An OrganicObject is an object at least as large as a cell of an organism, that consists predominantly of substances which are living or are derived from living things, or are synthetic substances similar to those found in living things. An OrganicObject may be living or dead, or if dead, highly processed, providing that the main active constituent is derived from or similar to those in living things. Thus one muscle or one apple pie would each be an OrganicObject, but one virus particle would be too small to qualify. A macroscopic object consisting of macromolecules such as protein, nucleic acid, or polysaccharide similar to those found naturally would be OrganicObjects, but a quantity of small molecules such as alcohol or amino acid would not be. In the triad 'animal, vegetable or mineral', this would be either of animal or vegetable. NOTE that this Type is disjoint with MineralObject, though an OrganicObject may have some minor portions of Mineral in it. NOTE in particular that a Corpse, skeleton, and FuneraryAshes are classified as 'OrganicObject' although a strong fire may have removed almost all of the carbon in it. COSMO note: This Cyc catagory is reinterpreted in COSMO to include certain subtypes of 'PhysicalSubstance', that are not subcategorixed solely on the basis of composition, but of other attributes, such as state of matter (e.g. SolidSubstance). One such category is 'CommodityProduct' which treats commercial products sold in quantities 9such as potatoes, onions) as 'substances'. Cyc: A collection of collections, and a specialization of #$TemporalStuffType. Each instance of #$ExistingStuffType is a collection of things (including portions of things) which are both temporally and spatially stufflike. Division in time or space does not destroy the stufflike quality of the object (down to a certain granularity). (#$isa STUFFTYPE #$ExistingStuffType) implies both (i) for most instances STUFF of STUFFTYPE, for any proper physical part (see #$physicalParts) PART of STUFF, PART is also an instance of STUFFTYPE and (ii) for all instances STUFF of STUFFTYPE, for most proper physical parts PART of STUFF, PART is also an instance of STUFFTYPE. For example, every piece of wood is temporally stufflike: if W-168 is a piece of wood during 1996, then it's also a piece of wood for the one-minute time-slice 9:05am 7/7/96. It's also spatially stufflike: if we take that piece of wood W-168 and cut it in half, we have two things which are both pieces of wood. Since every piece of wood is both temporally and spatially stufflike, #$Wood is an instance of #$ExistingStuffType. Other instances of #$ExistingStuffType include the collections #$AppleJuice, #$IceCream, #$Diamond, #$WaxedPaper, and #$StriatedMuscle. See the comment for #$StuffType to learn more about the distinctions between, and the need for, these four collections: #$StuffType, #$ObjectType, #$ExistingStuffType, and #$ExistingObjectType. bd59f2ea-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A subcollection of #$PartiallyTangible. Each instance of #$InanimateThing is an (at least partly) tangible thing that is not currently a living structure. Things that were never alive, dead organisms, and dead (or completely non-functioning) organism parts are included in this collection. Examples: #$YaleUniversity, a piece of #$Meat, a dead armadillo, the #$StatueOfLiberty, and a pile of #$Sawdust. Two important specializations of this collection are #$InanimateThing-Natural and #$InanimateThing-NonNatural. bd5905ea-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A #$SecondOrderCollection and a specialization of #$ExistingStuffType (q.v.). Each instance of #$TangibleStuffStateType is a collection of pieces of tangible stuff that are all in the same distinct physical state, where the notion of physical state is a naive (as in #$NaivePhysicsMt) concept of a distinctive physical structure and/or texture. Some instances of #$TangibleStuffStateType have distinctive chemical compositions, such as #$Diamond; but for collections that are distinguished _solely_ on the basis of chemical composition, see #$TangibleStuffCompositionType. #$TangibleStuffStateType includes both (i) collections of substances that can exist only in one distinct physical state (e.g. #$Diamond again) and (ii) collections of pieces of stuff that by definition are in a certain distinct state (e.g. ice). Instances of #$TangibleStuffStateType include #$Foam, #$Rubble, and (#$LiquidFn #$Water). Note that #$Water per se is _not_ an instance of #$TangibleStuffStateType, since some water is in a gaseous state or a solid state. See also (the somewhat orthogonal) #$PhysicalStructuralAttribute. be00c400-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 COSMO note: In Cyc, this was 'SolidTangibleThing', a collection of objects. In COSMO, we rename and repurpose this category to be a solid substance, with subtypes that are substances that are solid at normal temperature and pressure. Cyc comment: An instance of #$ExistingStuffType, and a specialization of #$PartiallyTangible. Each instance of #$SolidTangibleThing is a piece of stuff possessing many of the properties that matter in a solid state (see the constant #$Solid-StateOfMatter) exhibits (although not all instances of #$SolidTangibleThing are formally in a solid state). Instances have a shape independent from their container, and, when deformed with sufficient force (which may be small for weak, brittle materials or high for materials that deform easily), they break. Examples of #$SolidTangibleThings include: pieces of substances in a solid state of matter, such as ice cubes; solid mixtures like a quarter-dollar coin or a paper bag; and complex mixtures of biological origin that behave like solids, e.g., bone. Note that some pieces of matter that are formally in a solid state (for example, pieces of clay) are not instances of #$SolidTangibleThing, since they do not readily break when deformed; for this reason, #$Solid-StateOfMatter is _not_ a specialization of #$SolidTangibleThing. Collections of the solid form of any type of stuff can be created using #$SolidFn (q.v.). bd58c494-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 The attribute of being Opaque, i.e. of not permitting light to pass through. Specifying this can be useful in rendering objects in images, but perhaps it should be the default? NOTE that this is a ColorAttribute, and objects and substances can possess this attribute while also possessing other color attributes. COSMO note: Opacity is an attribute only of objects that have a certain size, or of solid substances; at molecular dimensions, almost nothing will absorb all of the light impinging on it. Cyc comment: #$Opaque is a #$PhysicalAttribute representing a specific degree of #$Transparency. #$Opaque objects do not transmit light. See also #$transparencyOfObject. COSMO note: Opacity is an attribute only of objects that have a certain size; at molecular dimensions, almost nothing will absorb all of the light impinging on it. Cyc comment: #$Opaque is a #$PhysicalAttribute representing a specific degree of #$Transparency. #$Opaque objects do not transmit light. See also #$transparencyOfObject. bd5138d4-74ba-11d6-8000-00a0c99cc5ae COSMO note: as of version 0.49, this category is not properly represented. COSMO has 'Corpse' as a subtype of 'BiologicalLivingObject' and these need to be distinguished. Cyc: The collection of all structures that are composed of one or more living cells (see #$Cell). Note that this can be solid or liquid, because blood and lymph are composed of cells. Biological living objects (or BLO s) might either be instances of #$Organism-Whole (like dogs or pine trees) or components of such whole living organisms (like noses, tails, and pine needles). The healthy leg of a living person is a BLO (as is the person), but an amputated leg is not a BLO. Almost every instance of #$BiologicalLivingObject is either capable of biological reproduction itself or has components which are capable of biological reproduction (such as the cells in a living arm). Red blood cells are abnormal instances of BLO in that they cannot reproduce. bd58a6ed-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 The subcollection of #$PartiallyTangible whose instances are not like fluids. #$NonFluidlike objects do not flow and have an intrinsic shape. #$NonFluidlike is primarily a collection union of #$SolidTangibleThing and #$SemiSolidTangibleThing. It is useful as a genl collection for certain collections whose members can be both #$SolidTangibleThings and #$SemiSolidTangibleThings, like #$Deformable. fe5bdeb6-74b9-11d6-8000-00a0c99cc5ae In OpenCyc this class is a collection of pieces of crystalline material. In COSMO it is reinterpreted as an attribute of some solids. Cyc: The collection of instances of #$PartiallyTangible having a solid crystalline structure. In a crystalline solid the atoms, ions, or molecules are ordered in well-defined arrangements. These solids often have flat faces that make angles with one another. They are frequently translucent and brittle. 892632f8-74bf-11d6-8000-00a0c99cc5ae In OpenCyc called 'Crystalline'. Cyc: The collection of instances of #$PartiallyTangible having a solid crystalline structure. In a crystalline solid the atoms, ions, or molecules are ordered in well-defined arrangements. These solids often have flat faces that make angles with one another. They are frequently translucent and brittle. 892632f8-74bf-11d6-8000-00a0c99cc5ae In Cyc called 'Organism-Whole'. An Organism must be a whole individual, composed of one or more cells, capable of living independently of other living things (though it may have to feed on other living things, even as a parasite). This cannot be just part of an organism, such as a liver removed and fed in a perfusion apparatus. An organism can be single-celled, like a bacterium. An organism must have a cell membrane that separates the internal cytoplasm from the exterior environment while it is living and metabolizing. Therefore a virus is not an organism, but a different form of life. A seed or spore or other reproductive body that is not metabolically active is not considered as a whole Organism, but as a part or a life stage of an Organism. NOTE carefully that in COSMO v0.2 the category 'Organism' by default is intended to represent typical living adults forms of an organism, but abnormal forms are not actually excluded logically. Therefore though we make certain necessary assertions about an 'Organism' without being concerned about exceptions, the results will be true only in the default case and certain logical contradictiona may occur. This is a temporary measure until a better way of handling default reasoning is implemented. Note, for example, that dead organisms are still categorized as Organisms (this is used mostly for People), even though an Organism is disjoint with 'InanimateThing' - this is to allow the reasoner to catch unintended mistakes of classification. . When exceptional circumstances are encountered, one should use the category 'ImmatureOrganism' or 'AbnormalOrganism'. Rather than reify such categories for each organism type, they can be generated by use of functions on the typical organism Type. If functions are not available in some implementation, reification may be necessary. A more accurate solution would be to leave the organisms as generic, and create a 'typical adult' subtype to hold the values for the prototype. This requires a quasi-duplicate typical type for each organism, which may ultimately be better, but is avoided at the present COSMO stage of version 0.2. Cyc: A specialization of #$BiologicalLivingObject. Each instance of #$Organism-Whole is a biological living object (BLO) that is a whole, and not part of some other BLO. Most instances of #$Organism-Whole are capable of existing and reproducing while physically separate from other organisms (with allowances for eating and mating). Abnormal BLOs which are nonetheless considered to be instances of #$Organism-Whole include instances of #$Virus, as well as sterile hybrids and colony organisms, like those in slime molds or the instances of #$PortugueseManOfWar. COSMO note: this includes animal parts as well as whole animals. For whole animals, use 'Animal'. Cyc: A specialization of #$BiologicalLivingObject that includes all living animals, body parts of living animals, and body regions of living animals. #$AnimalBLO is thus the union (see #$collectionUnion) of #$Animal, #$AnimalBodyPart, and #$AnimalBodyRegion (qq.v.). c0fe0761-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 The collection of all sentient agents. Instances of #$PerceptualAgent are #$IndividualAgents (q.v.) capable of performing acts of #$Perceiving (q.v.). In many cases information that a perceptual agent gathers through perceiving can influence certain other of the agent's actions. bd58a72d-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 #$EukaryoticOrganism is a specialization of #$Organism-Whole. Each instance of #$EukaryoticOrganism is an organism (individual organism, not type of organism) composed of #$EukaryoticCells (cells which have mitochondria, other organelles, and nuclei containing chromosomes). bfc8323a-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A specialization of #$Organism-Whole. Each instance of #$Heterotroph is an organism incapable of manufacturing organic nutrients from inorganic raw materials. All instances of #$Animal are instances of #$Heterotroph, since animals must eat other living things, or parts of living things, in order to get the nutrients they need to live. Other specializations of #$Heterotroph include #$ParasiticOrganism and #$Fungus. Cf. #$Autotroph. bd590331-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 VitalityAttributeType is a metatype which is a specialization of the Protege owl:Class that can serve as type for attributes specifyuing vitality (alive, dead) and an argument restriction for some relations on QualitativeAttributes. This is a primitive mechanism to accommodate OWL limitations. An instance of #$ExistingObjectType and a specialization of #$Agent-Generic. Each instance of #$IndividualAgent is an instance of #$Agent-Generic that is not itself a group composed of other instances of #$Agent-Generic. Notable specializations of #$IndividualAgent include #$Person and #$Animal. Note that #$Organization is not a specialization of #$IndividualAgent, since instances of #$Organization are groups composed of other instances of #$Agent-Generic. bd58a562-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 hasVitalityAttribute specifies whether an animal is alive, dead, sleeping, awake, unconscious, etc. Attributes other than the 'alive' and 'dead' attributes, do not apply to plants or microorganisms. @ToDo: a specialization of this for animals should be created. An instance of #$BiologicalKingdom, and a specialization of #$Organism-Whole. Instances of #$Animal are typically motile, living, whole organisms; they are instances of #$Heterotroph (q.v.), and thus incapable of performing instances of #$Photosynthesis-Generic. Animal cells contain cholesterol and lack cell walls made of cellulose. #$Person is a specialization of #$Animal; see also #$NonPersonAnimal. Note that not all animals are 'IntentionalAgents', able to form plans of action; as of v0.52, only mammals are characterized as IntentionalAgent - but this may change depending on whether evidence of planning is found in other branches of the Animal kingdom. SUMO: An Organism with eukaryotic Cells, and lacking stiff cell walls and photosynthetic pigments. WordNet includes 'creature' and 'beast' in the generic 'animal': 1. (16) animal, animate being, beast, brute, creature, fauna - (a living organism characterized by voluntary movement) bd58b031-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 animal creature creature1n An object that has an intrinsic front and back, or an intrinsic bottom and top, or an intrinsic left and right. (The 'or's here are of course inclusive.) See also the comments for the specializations #$FrontAndBackSidedObject, #$LeftAndRightSidedObject, #$TopAndBottomSidedObject, #$HexalateralObject. A perfectly smooth ball bearing is a negative example of a #$BilateralObject. On the other hand, a ball bearing with a dot painted on one side could be considered to have a well-defined front if, for example, the hemisphere centered around the dot were designated as the front side (see also #$NoteAboutSidedObject). A #$FrontAndBackSidedObject is a object with an intrinsic #$FrontSide and an intrinsic #$BackSide. By 'intrinsic' we mean simply that there exists an estabilshed convention according to which one side is considered 'Front' and the other side is considered 'Back'. Usually the two sides in question can be reliably distinguished. Notice that a conventionally distinguishable front and back do not necessarily imply a bottom and top, or a left and right: a #$Worm has a clear-cut front end and a clear-cut back end according to biological convention, but it makes little sense to talk of top, bottom, left or right. However, see also the comment for #$HexalateralObject. Notice also-and this is crucial to the whole conception- that while a #$FrontAndBackSidedObject may well have a preferred orientation and direction of motion, changing either does not change what counts as the 'front' and what counts as the 'back': while I am backing my car out of the driveway in the morning, its back end does not become its front end and vice versa. If an entity does not obey this rule then it does not, generally speaking count as having a distinguishable front and back-example: a dolley, such as is used to transport crates, or some skateboards. hasOrientation specifies the direction toward which the front end of an asymmetric object is pointed, The orientation can be in any number of dimensions. COSMO note: this is for object that are typically oriented vertically in a gravitational field (when functioning normally), and whose top and bottom sides are distinguishable. Cyc: A #$TopAndBottomSidedObject is an object with an intrinsic #$TopSide and an intrinsic #$BottomSide. By 'intrinsic' we mean simply that there exists an established convention according to which one side is considered 'top' and the other side is considered 'bottom'. Usually the two sides in question can be reliably distinguished from one another. For example, by convention, the 'top' of a #$Table-PieceOfFurniture is the side on which other objects usually rest, while the 'bottom' is the side which usually touches the floor. Notice that a conventionally distinguishable bottom and top do not necessarily imply a left and right, or a front and back. A plant is a good example of the case where they do not: top and bottom can be reliably distinguished but not, ordinarily, front and back or left and right. Notice also--and this is crucial to the whole conception--that while a #$TopAndBottomSidedObject may well have a preferred orientation, changing this orientation does not change what counts as 'top' and what counts as 'bottom': if a car flips over on the highway its top is now facing the pavement and its bottom--the undercarriage--is now up in the air. If an entity does not obey this rule then it does not, generally speaking, count as having a distinguishable top and bottom--example: an hourglass or a book. (see also #$NoteAboutSidedObject) be62f2a4-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A #$LeftAndRightSidedObject is an object with an intrinsic left side and an intrinsic right side. By 'intrinsic' we mean simply that there exists an established convention according to which one side is considered 'Left' and the other side is considered 'Right'. Usually, the two sides can be reliably distinguished from one another. Notice that a conventionally distinguishable left and right do not necessarily imply a bottom and top, or a front and back. Interestingly, it has proved impossible so far to find instances of objects with a left and right but no top, bottom, front or back. It is unclear why this should be so, but it apparently pertains to human psychology in reasoning about directions. However, if an object has a conventionally distinguished top, bottom, front, and back, then these suffice to determine an intrinsic left and an intrinsic right. Notice also--and this is crucial to the whole conception--that while a #$LeftAndRightSidedObject may well have a preferred orientation, changing this orientation does not change what counts as 'left' and what counts as 'right': if you turn me upside down my left side does not become my right side and my right side my left. If an entity does not obey this rule then it does not, generally speaking, count as having a distinguishable left and right--example: a houseplant. beb9d424-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A #$HexalateralObject is an object with a well-defined front, back, left, right, top, and bottom. These sides are considered to be intrinsic to the object and do not vary as the object changes position. Any object which is an instance of two different specs of #$BilateralObject is a #$HexalateralObject as a matter of definition-eg, if an object's front and back can be distinguished and its left side can be distinguished from its right, then it also has a well-defined bottom and top. See also comments for #$BilateralObject and for #$FrontAndBackSidedObject, #$LeftAndRightSidedObject, and #$TopAndBottomSidedObject. c123e501-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A GravitationallyBoundObject is an object that has a mass and density sufficiently large that it will (eventually) settle out from the Earth's atmosphere, in the absent of agitation or shear forces that keep it suspended. This Type is created to provide a more restricted Type of PhysicalObjects that will be the domain and range for relations of 'support' and 'on top of', excluding submicroscopic objects for which such relations make no sense. The subtype 'MacrosopicObject' and its subtypes will be those most commonly used with the 'support' relations. This type of Object need not be solid: portions of a liquid can be supported by surfaces and containers. A is a PhysicalObject that is visible and large enough to be perceived by human beings without the aid of a microscope or other aid to viewing small objects. It could be of any size, but will typically be used for objects no larger than the planet Earth. Larger objects will be 'LargeObject's or 'AstronomicalObject's. A specialization of #$PartiallyTangible. Each instance of #$HumanScaleObject is an object that can be perceived and manipulated by human beings. Instances of this collection range roughly from objects the size of pinheads to objects the size of aircraft carriers. COSMO Note: In Cyc, ConstructionArtifacts were subtypes of HumanScaleObject, but that does not fit the definition of manipulable by humans, so a size limit on HumanScaleObject should be considered as not much larger than an Aircraft Carrier, and stationary construction artifacts (which could be as large as the Alaska Pipeline or the Great Wall of China) will be subtypes of MacroscopicObject, which can be very large. For object scales below this one, the sizes decrease in order as: HumanScaleObject PortableObject SmallObject TinyObject Particle MicroscopicScaleObject SubatomicParticle. A subset of #$Animal, the collection of all animals which have a mind and are capable of conscious thought, or at least are best treated as such if you have to deal with them. bd58a520-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 Any attribute that specifically describes the shape of an object. OrganismObjectType is a metatype which is a specialization of the Protege owl:Class that can serve as type for LifeForms (including LifeForms that are not true Organisms) and an argument restriction for various relations on specific types of organisms. This is a primitive mechanism to accommodate OWL limitations on relation arguments. PersonType is a metatype which is a specialization of OrganismType that can serve as type for a Person in its aspect as an animal, rather than a Role, and an argument restriction for various relations on people. This is a primitive mechanism to accommodate OWL limitations on relation arguments. RoleType is a metaclass that is a subclass of both 'PersonType' and 'RoleType'. It is used as the Type restriction on certain relations that take subclasses of HumanRole as their argument. PlantType is a metatype which is a specialization of OrganismType that can serve as type for a Plant. This is a primitive mechanism to accommodate OWL limitations on relation arguments. Redefined as an attribute value. Cyc: The collection of objects with a structure that divides into containing cells or compartments. This includes both multi-cellular organisms and non-living cellular objects like beehives. 6d619d58-74bc-11d6-8000-00a0c99cc5ae The three-dimensional shape of a typical person: a head, torso, two arms, two legs. People with missing limbs will have a different shape attribute. COSMO note: 'cellular' is reclassified as a shape attribute. Cyc: #$MulticellularOrganism is a specialization of #$Organism-Whole. Each instance of #$MulticellularOrganism is an organism that is composed of more than one cell. In other words, this is the collection of all instances of #$Organism-Whole that are not instances of #$SingleCellOrganism. c08c4a77-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 The collection of all instances of Animal that are not instances of Person. Sometimes called 'Beast', but in COSMO this includes all non-human Animals, including insects, worms, fish, etc. NOTE: that Cyc distinguished 'Person' and 'Human' but that distinction is not followed in COSMO, so 'NonPersonAnimal' has been merged with 'NonHumanAnimal' Cyc (#$NonPersonAnimal) The collection of all instances of #$Animal that are not instances of #$Person, and thus incapable of participating in the activities and social roles characteristic of personhood. (For the more 'biological' concept of #$Animals that are not instances of #$HomoSapiens, see #$NonHumanAnimal). e6534f90-c2e0-41d7-80ce-bf3bf02a1467 bd58e066-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 animal creature creature1n Another term for 'NonHumanAnimal'. ('Tain't a fit night out for man nor beast). Another term for 'NonHumanAnimal'. This term is also used to refer to all animals. A specialization of #$Animal and an instance of #$OrganismClassificationType. Each instance of #$Homeotherm is a warm-blooded animal. That is, each instance is an animal that is able to maintain a stable body temperature relative to its environmental temperature. Cf. #$Poikilotherm. bd59432f-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A specialization of #$Animal. Each instance of #$ViviparousAnimal is an animal which is born from its mother's body. Cf. #$OviparousAnimal. bf058d0f-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 AN organism that eats animals - in Cyc includes carnivorous plants. In Cyc called 'Carnivore', but that term is usually reserved for the mammals, so 'Carnivore' is made a subtype of this category. Cyc: An #$OrganismClassificationType that classifies organisms by their typical source of food. Instances of #$Carnivore typically eat animals (or animal parts or animal-derived products) exclusively. Note that #$Carnivore is _not_ an instance of #$BiologicalTaxon (q.v.); cf. #$CarnivoreOrder. Also note that a #$Carnivore is not necessarily a #$Heterotroph; e.g. carnivorous plants both digest insects and produce food using #$Chlorophyll. bd5904f5-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A specialization of #$MulticellularOrganism and #$Animal. This is the collection of (individual) organisms that have three well-defined derm layers, an ectoderm, endoderm, and mesoderm, and posses a coelem. A coelem is a fluid-filled body cavity between the outer body wall and the gut. Members of the phylum Annelida (segmented worms), for example, are #$Coelomates. be8ad325-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 An instance of #$BiologicalPhylum within the #$BiologicalKingdom #$Animal, the #$ChordataPhylum contains the many chordate taxa. All chordate taxa have members who have a notochord (a flexible rod running the length of the body) at some stage of development and pharyngeal gills at some stage of development. The #$ChordataPhylum has as #$taxonMembers all the specializations of #$Vertebrate (including #$Person), as well as some non-vertebrate chordates like Amphioxus. bd59063b-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 An instance of #$BiologicalTaxon within the #$BiologicalPhylum #$ChordataPhylum. Each instance of #$Vertebrate is an animal that has a backbone or spine made of bony or cartilaginous vertebrae, which may be separate or fused. Notable specializations of #$Vertebrate include #$Mammal, #$Reptile, #$Bird, and #$Fish. bd58a5e6-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 #$AirBreathingVertebrate is a specialization of #$Vertebrate and an instance of #$OrganismClassificationType. Each instance of #$AirBreathingVertebrate is a vertebrate that usually respires by breathing #$Air during adult life. Includes individual #$Mammals, #$Birds, #$Reptiles, and most #$Amphibians. Most #$AirBreathingVertebrates are #$TerrestrialOrganisms, but some #$AquaticOrganisms breathe air (#$Whales, etc.). All #$AirBreathingVertebrates have #$Lungs and #$RespiratoryTracts. bef7c9c1-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 Mammals (female variety) can suckle their young (under certain circumstances), and also typically have hair. The playpus lays eggs, so not all mammals bear their young live. Cyc: An instance of #$BiologicalClass, and a sub-taxon of #$Vertebrate. Each instance of #$Mammal is an air-breathing, warm-blooded animal which, if female, nurses its young with milk secreted by mammary glands. The skin of instances of #$Mammal is typically covered with hair (or sometimes hair modified into scales or plates, as in pangolins), but some types are almost hairless. All mammals other than the Monotremes of Australia bear live young rather than laying eggs, and have teats, which on females are used for nursing the young. Monotremes do not have teats, but both male and female produce milk from mammary glands. bd58a628-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 #$Eutheria is a specialization of #$Mammal. Each instance of #$Eutheria is a placental mammal; most mammals are members of this collection. #$Eutheria are born live, nurse from their mothers' #$MammaryGlands and live outside their mothers' bodies. c0d463be-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 'feedsOn' is a specialized relation specifying the kind of food that an animal *typically* eats. This is primarily useful to describe the distinction between carnivores and herbivores, and in some cases the specialized eating habits of other types of animals. The typical food can be a substance ('Meat') or a type of organism (e.g. some birds specialize in eating insects). In Cyc called 'CarnivoreOrder'. The restriction requires that a Carnivore feedsOn (typically) 'Meat'. Specific types of Carnivore may feed on specific animals - that can be expressed as a restriction on the subtypes. SUMO: The Class of flesh-eating Mammals. Members of this Class typically have four or five claws on each paw. Includes cats, dogs, bears, racoons, and skunks. Cyc: An instance of #$BiologicalOrder, and a specialization of #$Mammal. Instances of #$CarnivoreOrder are mammals whose teeth are adapted for efficient cutting of meat and tendon. Although instances of #$CarnivoreOrder have teeth adapted for eating meat, not all instances of #$CarnivoreOrder are meat-eaters; #$Bears are omnivorous, while #$PandaBears are usually vegetarians. See also the collection #$Carnivore. NOTE that humans are not classified as Carnivores. bd58f431-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 The Cyc term for the concept 'Carnivore'. A specialization of #$Heterotroph (q.v.) and an instance of #$OrganismClassificationType. Instances of #$Omnivore are those animals whose natural diets consist of both plants (or plant parts or plant-derived products) and animals (or animal parts or animal-derived products). Thus a human vegetarian is still omnivorous, since meat is part of our natural diet. Specializations of this collection include #$Pig, #$Bear, and #$Person. See also #$Herbivore and #$Carnivore. bd58a5e1-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A specialization of #$Organism-Whole. Each instance of #$TerrestrialOrganism is an organism adapted to life on land, out of water. Instances of #$TerrestrialOrganism spend all or most of their time out of the water, either on the land surface or under it. Specializations of #$TerrestrialOrganism include #$Dog, #$Bird, and #$Person. bd590841-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 An instance of #$BiologicalOrder, and a sub-taxon of #$Eutheria. Each instance of #$Primate has a relatively large brain case, an unfused radius and ulna in the forelimbs, an unfused tibia and fibula in the hind limbs, and opposable thumbs. Notable specializations of #$Primate include #$Person, #$Orangutan, #$Gorilla, and #$Baboon. bd58a674-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 Includes Humans and relatively recent ancestors of Humans. Sense 1 of 'hominid' inWordNet: 1. hominid - (a primate of the family Hominidae) hominid hominid1n Similar to DOLCE: agentive-physical-object Intelligence in the sense used here requires the ability to understand language and communicate in a language at least close to the complexity of human language. This category includes only physical objects. At present, the level of intelligence required to belong to this category and be a physical object is possessed only by people. In the future, robots may qualify. Note that an 'Organization' is also intelligent in the sense used here, but is not a PhysicalObject, therefore does not fall into this category. DOLCE: Within Physical objects, a special place have those to which we ascribe generic intentionality (compatibly to Brentano's distinction, the ability to internally represent a description). These are called Agentive, as opposite to Non-agentive. In general, we assume that agentive objects are constituted by non-agentive objects: an organism is constituted by bodily organs, a robot is constituted by some machinery, and so on. Among non-agentive physical objects we have for example houses, bodily organs, pieces of wood, etc. Generic agentivity is defined here in a wide sense as implying representation or conception (to be characterized in a dedicated - but not developed as yet - ontology of mind). A representation or conception only requires intentionality in Brentano's terms (i.e., the ability to represent something to oneself). See also 'rational physical object'. see: Person Agent[Cyc]%agentive-physical-object[DOLCE] OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002 The collection of #$Agent-Generics (q.v.) that are not tangible artifacts (cf. #$AgentiveArtifact). #$Agent includes all naturally-occurring agents (e.g. #$Persons and #$Animals), any #$SupernaturalBeings (q.v.), and #$Organizations. Person(Cyc) Human(SUMO) Person is a member of the species Homo Sapiens, and is a synonym of 'Human Being'. As with other categories, this general Type includes all variants, in all contexts, so a fetus is a Person, a dead person is a Person, a fictional person is a Person, and a hypothetical but not yet conceived person is also a Person. The type of Person one is dealing with depends on the context. We typically want to deal with living persons, and that category is provided for convenience as the subType 'LivingPerson'. There is, however, no restriction on whether a Person or LivingPerson exists in the real world or in some fictional or hypothetical world; that distinction is left to the context to disambiguate. Allowing a dead Person to be a Person and also requiring that a Person is a PhysicalObject with mass presents a problem. Where is the mass of a dead Person? To allow this representation, we will permit a person to have 'remains', which would be the physical object that 'is' the Person. The 'remains' do not have to be an identifiable corpse, but can be the trace matter of a person's body, even if too dispersed to be recognizable as a Person's remains (e.g. ashes). A dead Person may 'be located' wherever its remains are, which could be widely dispersed; however, it is unlikely that the 'location' of a dead person will ever be an issue other than when the corpse is in a known grave; it is mentioned here only to provide a clear understanding of the intended meaning. Only a LivingPerson or a Corpse are compact physical objects that are Persons. 'Skeletal remains' may be dispered, and will not necessarily be compact objects. NOTE that in COSMO, when importing assertions created outside of a COSMO-aware system, it is permitted for default reasoning purposes to use the generic type of Organisms as meaning the typical **adult**, and specify attributes for the instances accordingly. If in some application or context it is necessary to deal with abnormal variants of an organism whether immature, diseased, or otherwise impaired, the categories 'ImmatureOrganism' or 'AbnormalOrganism' can be used. If one needs to make provision for abnormal (or dead) organisms, the default mechanisms must be used with extreme care. The subtype of 'LivingPerson' should be considered, though that category still includes fictional and hypothetical persons.. OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002 The collection of all human beings. Something is an instance of #$Person just in case it is a member of the species Homo Sapiens, and thus #$Person is an instance of #$BiologicalSpecies in the #$BiologyMt. Persons are the most intelligent kind of #$Primate, and the only kind known to be naturally capable of speaking a language. #$Person excludes non-human legal persons, who are, however, included in the collection #$LegalAgent. SUMO: Modern man, the only remaining species of the Homo genus. COSMO note: the superfluous parent Type 'Thing' was added so as to make this important Type easily visible by drill-down in the hierarchy. Corresponds to sense 1 of 'person', noun sense 1 of 'human' and sense 1 of 'human being' in WordNet: WN 'person' 1. (7229) person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul - (a human being; there was too much for one person to do') WN 'human' 1. (5) homo, man, human being, human - (any living or extinct member of the family Hominidae characterized by superior intelligence, articulate speech, and erect carriage) person person person1n human human1n human being human being1n ActionType is a metaclass used as the Type restriction on certain relations that take subclasses of Action as their argument. COSMO note: this metatype has not been used up to v0.50. It includes all actions that need some kind of training beyond mere observation and repetition. Things that need years of training are represented as 'SkilledActivityType'. Cyc: This is the collection of activities which must first be learned before they can be performed - i.e., before any role which is a specPred of #$doneBy can be played. be6f173a-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 COSMO note: this metatype has not been used up to v0.50. It may be used to help classify actions that require years of training. This differs from the Cyc interpretation. Cyc: This is the collection of collections of activities which require some specialized skill to perform--i.e., to play any role which is a specPred of #$doneBy. So, all skilled activities are learned, but not all learned activities are skilled. For instance, #$WalkingOnTwoLegs is an instance of #$LearnedActivityType but not an instance of #$SkilledActivityType. Since every normal person learns to walk, it requires no special skill. In contrast, #$Juggling is an instance of #$SkilledActivityType, for most people do not know how to juggle. bdb56b97-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 An Event in which some Agent plays a causative role. NOTE that an Agent may cause an action indirectly and with a time delay, via some device - and that action, controlled largely by the device, is still considered as an Action of that Agent in COSMO. This means that the 'action' set in motion by an Agent may continue even after the death of the Agent. Thus, the fire in an oil burner, being controlled by the Agent that controls the oil burner, is considered as an Action here, even though the burner continues for a long time automatically. The Action in such cases of indirect and delayed effects extends from the time at which the Agent started the action until the end of the time when the predictable immediate consequences occur. At some point it will probably be worthwhile distinguishing the Action of setting a Device from the Events controlled by the device, but as of v0.43 that distinction is not encoded. For Actions directly including only the immediate motion of an animal and its direct, almost simultaneous consequences, use 'AnimalActivity'. NOTE that a MentalEvent such as a feeling or Emotion is also considered an Action,as it is performed by a CognitiveAgent. In different ontologies, the same notion has different names: Action(Cyc) IntentionalProcess (SUMO) action(DOLCE) Activity(ISO15926). NOTE: in COSMO we classify an 'Experience' as a subtype of 'Action' to indicate that the focus of the subject is an Agent, even though no Events external to the Agent may be caused by the Experience. Cyc comment: The collection of #$Events (q.v.) that are carried out by some doer (see #$doneBy). Instances of #$Action include any event in which one or more actors effect some change in the (tangible or intangible) state of the world, typically by an expenditure of effort or energy. Note that it is not required that any tangible object be moved, changed, produced, or destroyed for an action to occur; the effects of an action might be intangible (such as a change in a bank balance or the intimidation of a subordinate). Note also that the doer of an action, though typically an #$Agent (q.v.), need not be (e.g. a falling rock that dents a car's roof). Depending upon the context, doers of actions might be animate or inanimate, conscious or nonconscious. For actions that are intentional, see #$PurposefulAction and #$performedBy. SUMO: A 'Process' that has a specific purpose for the 'CognitiveAgent' who performs it. DOLCE: A Perdurant that exemplifies the intentionality of an agent. Could it be aborted, incomplete, mislead, while remaining a (potential) accomplishment ... The point here is that having a result depends on a method, then an action remains an action under incomplete results. As a matter of fact, if we neutralize intentionality, a purely topological, post-hoc view is at odds with the notion of incomplete accomplishments. bd58a841-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 phenomenon[DOLCE?no_actor_involved] A phenomenon is basically an Event that does not include any intentional active participation. Therefore it is disjoint with 'Action'. Natural events that are not caused by the action of an animal will be subtypes of this category. DOLCE (phenomenon) Therefore, it cannot be sequenced by a task. It can be seen as an accomplishment when some intentionality puts boundaries on it (although it is not claimed to be inherently intentional). On the other hand, a purely physical phenomenon does not seem to have inherent boundaries either ... and also for biological processes as well as economic processes this seems to be disputable. If the boundary hypothesis is discarded, phenomenon should migrate under process. A common term, also used in ISO15926, for 'Action'. hasParticipant relates an Event to the things (Objects, Substances) that participate in the Event in some role, as causative agents, or as instruments, or as products or in other roles (e.g. as witnesses). This is the most general 'case' relation that is conceptual rather than strictly grammatical. It can be used to express a relation between types or instances. It will usually be used to refer to past Events, but may refer to future or hypothetical Events.. Participants include the inputs and outputs of Events that are creation or destruction events. See, for example, 'produced'. COSMO note: Objects may 'participate' in an Event without being a 'patient', for example in a BeliefState the Belief involved is a participant in the Event, but the properties of the belief involved are not among the fluents that are affected by the Event. Rather, in that case, the relationship between the Agent and the belief is the fluent. the inverse of 'hasParticipant'. This relation points from an instance of Object (physical or abstract) to an Event in which the Object participated (in any role). hadMainParticipant relates an Event to the Object whose properties and relations ('fluents') are the primary things begin represented by the specific type of Event. This relation is used for Events for which a single participant is the dominant theme. wasPerformedByAgent points from an Action to the Agent that performed that Action. It is in the past tense, as Events in COSMO are considered as bounded in time, and must be in the past after the end point. This 'perform' relation includes the 'experiencer' case role for mental events. The inverse of 'wasPerformedByAgent' - relates an agen to the action in which s/he was principle agent. 'wasExperiencedBy' points from a MentalEvent to the CognitiveAgent that performed (experienced) that Event. It is in the past tense, as Events in COSMO are considered as bounded in time, and must be in the past after the end point. This is the collection of all activities which are performed in a state of consciousness, that is, the animal performing the action is not sleeping, in a coma, or otherwise unconscious. a8eb2b06-d712-41d6-8443-9a24c2022ade A specialization of both #$Action and #$AtLeastPartiallyMentalEvent. Each instance of #$PurposefulAction is an action consciously, volitionally, and purposefully done by (see #$performedBy) at least one actor. In SUMO, equivalent to 'IntentionalProcess'. SUMO: A Process (Event) that has a specific purpose for the CognitiveAgent who performs it. bd589e3f-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 The 'Mind' is a MentalObject that is the 'location' for the processes of thinking and understanding and feeling in animals. As a non-material thing, it is a vague notion that is defined in various ways, discussed below. Every Mind is 'located' at some Brain; if a Mind is reified, the Brain it is located at must also be reified (and by transitivity, the animal having that Brain). In some usages, the Mind might be considered equivalent to the Brain, but it has traditionally been used to refer to a non-matgerial thing, and will be use dthat way in COSMO. The intimate relation of the Mind to the Brain is indicated by the 'isLocatedAt' restriction. This includes several senses of 'mind' in Random House Webster, but includes the processes that produce emotions as well as rational thinking. RHW sense 1,3, and 4 exclude feelings (sense 2 seems to be more inclusive) and WordNet sense 1 includes feelings, whereas sense 7 appears closer to the COSMO 'Intellect' and to RHW senses 1,3, and 4. In COSMO, Feeling is also located in the Mind. To make the distinction, the type 'Intellect' is used to refer to the *part* of the Mind that is responsible for thinking and reasoning; this is not a physical object, but is used to make sense of statements about what goes on 'in the mind' of a person. RWH 'mind': 1. (in a human or other conscious being) the element, part, substance, or process that reasons, thinks, feels, wills, perceives, judges, etc.: the processes of the human mind. 2. Psychol. the totality of conscious and unconscious mental processes and activities. 3. intellect or understanding, as distinguished from the faculties of feeling and willing; intelligence. 4. a particular instance of the intellect or intelligence, as in a person. This corresponds to sense 1 of 'mind' in WordNet: 1. (121) mind, head, brain, psyche, nous - (that which is responsible for one's thoughts and feelings; the seat of the faculty of reason; 'his mind wandered'; 'I couldn't get his words out of my head') bd58d06f-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 mind mind mind1n 'Intellect' is a MentalObject that is the part of the Mind in which the processes of Thinking and Reasoning (as contrasted with Feelings) are 'located'. 'Intellect' is not a a PhysicalObject, but may be considered as an informal way to refer to the parts of the Brain that are responsible for thinking rationally as contrasted with emotions. Each Intellect is part of some Mind, but the restriction value is the type 'Mind' and does not require that the 'Mind' be reified. Longman's vocabulary has 'mind' but not 'intellect', and the term 'mind' is probably used there (in one sense) in the same sense as 'Intellect' in COSMO. Corresponds to noun sense 1 of 'intellect' and sense 7 of 'mind' in WOrdNet: 1. (5) mind, intellect - (knowledge and intellectual ability; "he reads to improve his mind"; "he has a keen intellect") mind COSMO note: Every 'MentalSituation' is an Event, Process, or State that occurs in some Mind. Since every Mind is located in a Brain, MentalSituations also must occur in some Brain (meaning in some animal). Cyc: A specialization of #$Situation. Each instance of #$MentalSituation is a mental situation such as a person seeing the color red, or believing that his enemies control the CIA, or desiring that Fidel Castro shave his beard. An important subcollection of this collection is #$AtLeastPartiallyMentalEvent whice is the collection of mental situations that are events, such as thinking about something or tasting something. Other instances of #$MentalSituation are more long-standing and stable, and hence also instances of #$StaticSituation, e.g., believing something, or having some goal. Cf. #$MentalSituationFn. bee2989e-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 NOTE: name changed in COSMO. In Cyc this is 'AtLeastPartiallyMentalEvent'. Cyc: A collection of events. Each instance of #$AtLeastPartiallyMentalEvent is an event involving the mental functions of a participant or group of participants (see #$actors) in that event. The collection includes such things as dreaming, perceiving, sensing, theorizing about something, having a realization, making a decision, building something, designing something, and consciously carrying out a task. Note that the above list includes both purposeful events and non-purposeful events that involve mental functions. Note also that any event that has a mental component is also an instance of this collection, so that events like preparing lunch would be classified as instances of #$AtLeastPartiallyMentalEvent. In entering knowledge, it is almost always possible and preferable to use one of the specializations of #$AtLeastPartiallyMentalEvent. If an event seems mostly mental in nature, modulo neurons firing and related brain activity, use #$StrictlyMentalEvent or one of its specializations. If it essentially involves both mental and physical activity, see #$CompositePhysicalAndMentalEvent or #$PurposefulPhysicalAction. For mental events that are intentionally and purposefully performed, see the specialization #$PurposefulMentalActivity. COSMO note: this appears to be similar to SUMO 'PsychologicalProcess', which is a subtype of Event. SUMO: A BiologicalProcess which takes place in the mind or brain of an Organism and which may be manifested in the behavior of the Organism. bd588615-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A FutureTimeInterval is a TimeInterval that occurs after some TimePointOfReference, on the universal time line.. Procedure[SUMO]_Method[DOLCE] Procedure is the most general Type that represents a sequence of actions that an agent (person, organization, automaton) might take to achieve some specific goal state. Each known Procedure is a resource that an Agent has a a possible tool to use when confronted with a Goal, in the manner of 'cawse-based reasoning': IF I want to achieve this goal-state AND the current state is S, AND procedure P345 is expected to achieve that goal state form that starting state THEN execute P345. . Procedures will form the ontological analogue of 'procedural memory' in people. It is not required that a Procedure actually have been implemented in the 'real world' in order to be represented. Called: Procedure (in SUMO); Method (in DOLCE) DOLCE: A description that contains a specification to do, realize, behave, etc. Subclasses are plan, technique, practice, project, etc. A sequence-dependent specification. Some examples are ComputerPrograms, finite-state machines, cooking recipes, musical scores, conference schedules, driving directions, and the scripts of plays and movies. In Cyc the class 'DevisedStructuredActivity' has some of the same elements, but a Procedure is a specialization of that category, being that set of activities that have more required order in the execution of the actions specified. This distinction shows up in the category of 'Game' being a subtype of DevisedStructuredActivity' while an industrial process would be a subtype of 'Procedure'. Plan[SUMO]_Plan[DOLCE] DOLCE: A plan is a method for executing or performing a procedure or a stage of a procedure.A plan must use both at least one role played by an agent, and at least one task.Finally, a plan has a goal as proper part, and can also have regulations and other descriptions as proper parts. SUMO: A specification of a sequence of Processes which is intended to satisfy a specified purpose at some future time. A RelativeTime is any TimeTinterval or TimePoint whose location on the Universal Time Line is specified relative to some other TemporalThing. The times 'Now', 'Tomorrow' or 'Sunday' are such RelativeTimes. A TimePointOfreference is a TimePoint that is used to refer to the aspectual attribute of some Situation (i.e. SituationProcessEventOrState), i.e. an Event will be present, past, or future depending on the TimePointOfReference in the MentalObject that refers to that Situation. An Intention is MentalObject within a CognitiveAgent that refers to some future Action that the agent intends to participate in, in some capacity. The representation of this notion is complex in OWL, since it involves specifying two related things: there is a future Action; and the Agent will participate in that Action (of course all Future Actions are contingent, but *if* the *specific* FutureAction that is referenced occurs, the Agent *will* be a participant). Note that the Agent does not have to desire the FutureAction to occur - the Agent may be *forced* to participate, and have an Intention to participate, because not to participate would entail some undesirable consequences, which might be trivial (disappointing someone) or serious (loss of the Agent's life). This is one disctinciton between an Intention and a Goal - a 'Goal' in COSMO references a FutureSituation that the Agent desires to happen - for the Agent's own purposes. An Agent may have an Intention to participate in some FutureAction only because it is an imposed Obligation. A FutureSituation is a Situation, Process, Event, or State that has not yet happened, i.e. that still lies in the Future. Obviously, instances of this category must have some base time as a referent, since Events that are future at one time will be past at another time. But this category is useful to make clear the meaning of some Mental entities that reference future events, such as Goals. A measure of a quantity of time, *not* a specific time point on the univeresal time line. COSMO note: we distinguish TimeMeasures - physical measures that relate to time (timeintervals or time points) - from the TimePositions - the actual locations in our real time. The latter are classified under 'TemporalLocation'. The usage of this Type here differs from that in SUMO. For DateTime see 'TemporalLocation'. SUMO: The class of temporal durations (instances of TimeDuration) and positions of TimePoints and TimeIntervals along the universal timeline (instances of TimePosition). A DesiredFutureSituation is a FutureSituation, (a Process, Event, or State) that has not yet happened, and is desired by some CognitiveAgent. The desire will be represented in some Desire, Goal or Rule. Points to a string with axioms that include reference to the domain entity. (UAX: SUMAX-25) (<=> (disjoint ?CLASS1 ?CLASS2) (and (instance ?CLASS1 NonNullSet) (instance ?CLASS2 NonNullSet) (forall (?INST) (not (and (instance ?INST ?CLASS1) (instance ?INST ?CLASS2)))))) Classes are disjoint only if they share no instances, i.e. just in case the result of applying IntersectionFn to them is empty. SUMO - 155 points from an instance of Synonym to a string that is the term which is synonymous to the base concept. The term should represent the synonym in its natural form, whether capitalized, with spaces, apostrophes, etc. hasSynonym is used to point to AbstractStrings that can serve as a synonym for the base entity (type or instance), in some context. This relation points to an instance of Synonym, and that instance can specify the context in which it is a synonym for that word. Because a single word can be a synonym of multiple terms, the structure of the 'Synonym' entity includes not only the String expression of the synonymous term, but also the context in which it is a synonym. Among the contexts, databases and other knowledge models are included. A superfluous relation for testing. A Sign is something that refers to something other than itself; it may be a single entity or a group of entities. It can be an Object, an Event, a Process, or an Attribute. This is a very general category. A Sign may be Physical or Abstract or Mental. 'Sign' is a very general concept, and is used primarily through its specialized subtypes. A physical phenomenon (smoke) can be a sign (of a smoke-producing process), and an AbstractSymbolicObject such as the abstract string 'cat' can be a sign that refers to some animals in the real world. isaSignOf relates a specific Sign or SignType to something to which it refers in some way - perhaps by providing evidence os something, or merely CommunicationType is a metaclass used as the Type restriction on certain relations that take subclasses of Communication as their argument. a metatype that can be used as an argument restriction for relations that take a subtype of Feeling as one of their arguments.. a metatype that can be used as an argument restriction for relations that take a subtype of Sign as one of their arguments.. A SignObject is a PhysicalObject that is a Sign of something other than itself. It is not necessarily an Artifact.. isaSymptomOf relates a Symptom (a Sign of some abnormality) to the AbnormalCondition of which it is a sign. A Trace is one or more Signs that relate to ordered states of some Event or FunctionalProcess. A sequence of footprints in the mud can be a Trace of the event of some animal walking on that ground; a sequence of abstract symbols, stored in one of more computers, can provide a Trace of some computational or reasoning process such as one carried out in the computer. A Symptom is a Sign that is also a SituationProcessEventOrState, and which provides evidence of an abnormal condition.. A Record is an abstract sequence of symbols (usually linguistic) representing a sequence of events that occurred. For example, a sequence of abstract symbols, stored in one of more computers, can provide a Trace of some computational or reasoning process such as one carried out in the computer. As an Artifact, it has to have an IntelligentAgent as creator - for traces generated by a computer, that Agent will be the programmer or, if sufficiently autonomous, the computer itself - or both. A ReasoningRecord is a Record of some process of Reasoning. It will usually be a process of Reasoning used in a Computer, but could be a record of a person's reasoning.. A RelativeLocation is a location that is explicitly relative to something else, which may be a region or an object. All locations are ultimately 'relative' in the sense that they can only be understood by reference to a distance and/or oritentation with respect to some object. However, this Type 'RelativeLocation' is intended to represent those locations that are explicitly relative to something else, in particular objects or regions that are part of some other object or region. isAheadOf relates one location to another location that is behind the first by some spatial interval. 'behind' and 'ahead' imply some direction, but the direction is not specified here. Often the implied direction is a direction of movement for the thing that is 'behind', i.e. a person in a car travelling on a highway may say that a city is 'fifty miles ahead', or another car on the highway is 'fifty feet ahead'. The relations specified by 'ahead' are inherently multiple arity - including two locations (or objects) and some reference to the direction. In an OWL binary formalism, it would be necessary to use {?Obj2 isAheadOf ?Obj1} with {{?Obj2 and ?Obj1} isLocatedAt ?Path} Where {?Obj2 and ?Obj1} is a pair of objects (or locations). But even here, it is not necessarily clear that the 'ahead' refers to that particular ?Path. The full description of 'ahead' should use multiple arity relations. This is a placeholder, for the OWL version of COSMO. This is the most generic generic 'location' relation, and differs from its subProperty 'isLocatedAt' only in that to be 'located at or on' includes the possibility that some pile of objects may be located in some open container and extend beyond the top of the container, but will move when that container moves because it is held to the container by the force of gravity or by some topological constraint. The subproperty 'isLocatedAt' means that the thing located is wholly located within the spatial region coextensive with the ConvexHull of the thing or place where it is located. Thus a pile of coal in an open railway coal car can be said to be 'contained' in the coal car even though it may extend above the top of the coal car; it will go wherever the coal car goes, as long as it satisfies this relation. Likewise, flowers in a vase are located 'at or on' the vase, though they typically extend beyond the top of the vase, and the top of the flowers may even be above the vase by more than the height of the vase. The 'isContainedIn' relation is a subproperty of this relation; therefore if {?x isContainedIn ?Obj} then {?x isLocatedAtOrOn ?Obj}. NOTE, however that 'isSupportedBy' is not a subtype of 'isLocatedAtOrOn' because the supporting object may be flat and extensive, and the supported object may extend well above the surface of the supporting object.. A general 'location' relation for objects and regions (but not for Events - use 'occurredAt'). The location can be a region of space (connected or disconnected) or an object (physical or abstract). Being 'located' at an Object means being located within the ConvexHull of the Object; therefore a Hole in an Object, which contains no part of the Object 'isLocatedAt' that Object. Also, recall that a GeographicalRegion includes some space above the surface of that region, so it is possible that ?obj isLocateAt a GeographicalRegion even if it is in the air not far above the surface of that region. If a pile of objects or a large object is 'contained' in an open-top container, and extends above the top of that container, it cannot be said to be 'located at' that container, in this sense. For that case, use 'isContainedIn' or its parent 'isLocatedAtOrOn'. The value (object) of this relation answers the question 'where is it?' (for the subject) in some sense. Somewhat non-intuitively, this relation can be used to specify that some set of beliefs (a BeliefSystem) is held by one or more people, since the BeliefSystem is considered an InformationStore that can have a physical location; that is, beliefs are located in the heads of people, or of Groups of people. However, NOTE that specific instances of a disease cannot be 'located' in people by this relation, because a Disease is considered as an Event. Use 'occurredAt' for relating specific instances of Disease to particular people or groups of people. NOTE that this is an instance-level relation and describes where an object is actually located at some particular time. For describing where objects typically are located (e.g. parts of the body), use 'isNormallyLocatedAt', a relation that can take a individual Object or an ObjectType as the subject NOTE: 'isLocatedAt' may be used with an instance of 'TimeAndPlace' (a four-dimensional portion of space-time) in the object position of the relation, to specify the location of some thing (but not Events) over some interval of time, using a binary relation. Although this relation is transitive, there are permitted range instances that cannot bw located at some permitted domain instances: for example, a 'TimeAndPlace' will never be locatedAt an Object or region that is not itself Four-dimensional, unless the domain instance is nominally a TimeAndPlace, but with the Time dimension of zero length, in which case the domain instance is effectively three-dimensional. But in general, if the subject is a TimeAndPlace, the Object should also be a TimeAndPlace, not a Region or Object. To avoid unintended errors, this restriction should be encoded as a constraint. NOTE: this relation is close in meaning to that of the OBO_REL relation 'located_in' (http://www.obofoundry.org/ro/#OBO_REL:located_in). In OBO some relations may also be used on Types to create an implicit restriction, but such usage is not part of COSMO, and that usage would need to be represented as a rule. OBO_REL: located_in (see http://www.obofoundry.org/ro/) OBO comments for located_in: Location as a relation between instances: The primitive instance-level relation c located_in r at t reflects the fact that each continuant is at any given time associated with exactly one spatial region, namely its exact location. Following we can use this relation to define a further instance-level location relation - not between a continuant and the region which it exactly occupies, but rather between one continuant and another. c is located in c1, in this sense, whenever the spatial region occupied by c is part_of the spatial region occupied by c1. Note that this relation comprehends both the relation of exact location between one continuant and another which obtains when r and r1 are identical (for example, when a portion of fluid exactly fills a cavity), as well as those sorts of inexact location relations which obtain, for example, between brain and head or between ovum and uterus A 'location' relation for Events. For object or region locations, see 'isLocatedAt'. The location is a GenericLocation: region of space (connected or disconnected) or an object (physical or abstract) . The value of this relation answers the question 'where did it happen?'. NOTE that the use of the past tense in this relation does not necessarily mean that the Event argument occurred in the past before the assertion time; if the relation relates a possible future Event, this relation can also be used. The past tense merely emphasizes that we are discussing Events that, in the given context, are viewed as completed and not ongoing. This can also be used for types of Events, to specify a particular location where they always occur. But to specify types of locations where types of Events usually occur, use 'typicallyOccursAt'. A Type-level 'location' relation for Events, to specify that a certain type of Event usually occurs at a certain type of location. This is intended as a type-level relation to avoid the need for instantiating or Skolemizing the values, but the domain is both type and instance level so that a restriction using this relation can be inherited by subtypes. For the instance-level location relation for Events, use 'occurredAt'. For object or region locations, see 'isLocatedAt'. The location specified is a GenericLocation: region of space (connected or disconnected) or an object (physical or abstract) . The value of this relation answers the question 'where does it usually happen?'. . A Type-level 'location' relation for Events, to specify that a certain type of Event *always* occurs at a certain type of location. For the instance-level location relation for Events, use 'occurredAt'. A Type-level 'location' relation for Events, to specify that a certain type of Event usually occurs *inside* a certain type of object. isNearTo specifies that some GenericLocation (an Object or a Region) is 'near' to another, but (usually) not touching the other. 'near' is relative to the size of the things being related. To be 'near' another region or object, the distance from one Object or Region to the other must be within two diameters of the larger object or region. NOTE that 'isSupportedBy' is a subproperty of 'isNearTo'. If two objects are touching, that can be represented as a 'TouchingState'. In SUMO treated as an attribute: SUMO: (Near) The relation of common sense adjacency. Note that, if an object is Near another object, then the objects are not connected.. isAdjacentTo specifies that some GenericLocation (an Object or a Region) is 'adjacent' to another. This means that it might be touching, with nothing in between, or might be separated by some thin space, which might have a name, as in a 'crack' or a sulcus in the brain. If there is a solid object separating them, two GenericLocations can be 'near' but not 'adjacent'. NOTE that this relation makes intuitive sense only when the adjacent objects are of comparable size. We do not usually say that a bacterium on the skin is 'adjacent to' the skin. A different (perhaps more general) relation should be defined for such cases, because the gap that exists in non-touching cases can be large relative to one object and small relative to the other. NOTE: this is similar to the instance-level OBO_REL relation 'adjacent_to', except that this COSMO relation is solely an instance relation and is not used at the Type level. For specifying the typical relations of Types (as in the OBO definition below), a separate class-level relation and inference axioms will be required. OBO_REL: relation adjacent_to: (only the instance-level relation is similar to COSMO 'isAdjacentTo'. Definition: C adjacent to C' if and only if: given any instance c that instantiates C at a time t, there is some c' such that: c' instantiates C' at time t and c and c' are in spatial proximity. OBO Comments: Note that adjacent_to as thus defined is not a symmetric relation, in contrast to its instance-level counterpart. For it can be the case that Cs are in general such as to be adjacent to instances of C1 while no analogous statement holds for C1s in general in relation to instances of C. Examples are: nuclear membrane adjacent_to cytoplasm; seminal vesicle adjacent_to urinary bladder; ovary adjacent_to parietal pelvic peritoneum A FunctionQuantity is a Function that maps from one or more instances of ConstantQuantity to another instance of ConstantQuantity. For example, the velocity of a particle would be represented by a FunctionQuantity mapping values of time (which are ConstantQuantities) to values of distance (also ConstantQuantities). Note that all instances of FunctionQuantity are Functions with a fixed arity. Note too that all elements of the range of a FunctionQuantity have the same physical dimension as the FunctionQuantity itself. A ConstantQuantity is a PhysicalQuantity which has a constant value, e.g. 3 meters and 5 hours. The magnitude (see MagnitudeFn) of every ConstantQuantity is a RealNumber. ConstantQuantities are distinguished from FunctionQuantities, which map ConstantQuantities to other ConstantQuantities. All ConstantQuantites are expressed with the BinaryFunction MeasureFn, which takes a Number and a UnitOfMeasure as arguments. For example, 3 Meters can be expressed as (MeasureFn 3 Meter). ConstantQuantities form a partial order (see PartialOrderingRelation) with the lessThan relation, since lessThan is a RelationExtendedToQuantities and lessThan is defined over the RealNumbers. The lessThan relation is not a total order (see TotalOrderingRelation) over the class ConstantQuantity since elements of some subclasses of ConstantQuantity (such as length quantities) are incomparable to elements of other subclasses of ConstantQuantity (such as mass quantities). a metatype that can be used as an argument restriction for relations that take a subtype of SystemCondition as one of their arguments.. a metatype that can be used as an argument restriction for relations that take a subtype of AilmentCondition as one of their arguments.. A Desire is MentalObject within a CognitiveAgent that is basically emotional, though the emotion of Desire may be caused by the conclusion of a rational thinking process. A Person may desire a thing (i.e. to possess a thing), or some future situation - for something to happen, or some process to occur, or some state to come into existence. a spcialization of 'Desire' is a 'Goal', which similarly refers to some future situation, but bringing about that future situation involves some action on the part of the Agent with the Goal. Although in language we can say that a person 'desires' an object, in COSMO that would be represented as the person desiring the 'DesiredFutureSituation' in which that person possesses that object, so the desired thing is in all cases a Situation, even if an Object is indirectly referenced as a participant in that Situation. NOTE that the restriction on this Type referencfes a 'DesiredFuruteSituation' rather than merely a FutureSituation. This requires that, in secifyhing a Desire and the Situaion desired, that Situationj should be categorized as a DesiredFutureSituation so that it can contian a pointer back to the Agent who wants it, and serve as an index of which agents would be pleased to see a particular Situation happen. (Not all agents need to be thus referenced, as certain DesiredFutureSituations such as the election of some person to an office, may be desired by a very large number of people). NOTE: In SUMO, 'desires' is treated as a relationship between some CognitiveAgent and a proposition describing the thing desired, and a 'Desire' would be the Proposition that is the object of that relation. But there is another difference. The SUMO 'desires' apparently is closer to COSMO 'Goal' since it involves participation of the Agent. The SUMO relation is described here for reference, but is not equivalent to 'Desire' in COSMO. SUMO: (definition of 'desires') '(desires ?AGENT ?FORMULA)' means that ?AGENT wants to bring about the state of affairs expressed by ?FORMULA. Note that there is no implication that what is desired by the agent is not already true. Note too that desires is distinguished from wants only in that the former is a PropositionalAttitude, while wants is an ObjectAttitude. A Goal is a MentalObject that relates to a Situation that an IntelligentAgent desires and intends to make happen by taking some action. In COSMO a Goal is a Group of MentalObjects that necessarily includes a Desire - because the Goal references something that an Agent wants to happen, which is the characteristic of a Desire. A Goal, in addition to the desire to see something happen, includes the intention (expectation) that the Agent her/himself will take some action to help make that thing happen. NOTE that a 'Goal' includes an Intention, but differs from an Intention in that the Goal references a situation that the Agent desires, whereas an Intention to do something does not necessarily imply that the Agent wants the FutureSituaion to happen for the Agent's own purposes. COSMO note: In OpenCyc a Goal is a subtype of '#ELSentence-Assertible' - i.e. an assertion. Although the Cyc representation of 'Goal' includes many of the intuitions that seem to be contained in the usual meaning of 'Goal', the linguistic usage appears to be closer to the notion of the goal being the realization of the actual situation that an agent (usually a person) wants to become true; however, the Goal is in the mind of the IntelligentAgent, and is created by the IntelligentAgent, but is not a PhysicalObject, threfore is best represented as MentalObject in COSMO, rather than the situation itself. It necessarily includes some intention, but is not the intention itself. So the representation of a Goal must include each of these elements in relation to each other. NOTE that a Goal references some desired FutureSituation. When the FutureSituation has occurred and is no longer in the Future, the Goal itself must terminate its existence, and the Goal will be located in the past, Restrictions specify that every instance of Goal must specify the IntentionalAgent who has the goal (through the relation 'wasCreatedBy') and the DesiredFutureSituation that has caused that Goal to arise. Cyc: Typically, this attribute characterizes relationships holding between Cyc formulas and a particular agent when the formula describes a state of affairs that the agent intends to take steps to actualize, i.e., when actualizing the state of affairs is a goal of the agent. However, it might also be seen as an attribute of the relationship between the agent and the static situation depicted by that cyc formula (see #$StateFn). This is the most general goal attribute and should be used only when one is unable to specify more exactly what kind of goal the relevant state of affairs is for an agent. ToDO: axioms must specify that the FutureSituation of the Desire and Intention are the same, and that the Agent that has the Goal will be a participant in the FutureSituaion. bd58fb03-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 'hasPriority' is a specialized relation for Goal, indicating what is the the relative priority (importance) of that Goal for the agent who has that Goal. A Priority value can be explicitly an OrdinalNumber (First, Second), or may be undetermined ('Unranked') or vague ('HighRank', 'LowRank') . A Rule is a special kind of Proposition that asserts that some agent has some Obligation to do (or refrain from doing) some act. This is not a logical 'rule', which is categorized in the type 'Axiom'. NOTE that as a subtype of Proposition, this 'Rule' type represents the conceptual content, not the abstract symbolic things (AbstractTexts) that describe the Rule, nor the physical texts on which the Rule may be visibly written. Every Rule specifies what is desired or mandatory for some future situation, and carries the expectation that agents who conform to the Rule will make that Situation happen. The definition of Rule subsumes simple games as well as complicated laws and business rules. The future situations may be processes, events, or states. Thus the Rule 'stop for a red light' refers to the situation where a vehicle approaches an intersection with a traffic light that is red; - to conform to the Rule, the vehicle must perform the event of stopping before the location of the light. That event of stopping is the desired situation that the Rule specifies. Although Rules are created to be applied to Agents, it is difficult in many cases to specify the agents to whom the rules are intended to apply, as the agents may be in some cases only vaguely defined by membership in a class - for example, game rules only apply to those playing the game at some particular time. Laws may apply to anyone 'within the jurisdiction'. A MentalObjectGroup is a Group consisting solely of MentalObjects. A Proposition is the abstract propositional content (i.e. the 'meaning') of some sentence, formula, or combination of sentences in any language. A Proposition is the actual meaning of a sentence or sentences in any language, and is independent of the language and of the symbol system used to encode the meaning. A related collection of Propositions is still considered as a Proposition; a prominent example is the body of accepted lore in some FieldOfStudy. Every Proposition has at least one topic related by the 'hasTopic' relation. There may be some temptation to use the subtypes of Proposition (Assertion, Axiom, Rule) as though they are symbolic objects - perhaps AbstractTexts. In casual conversation this will create no problems, and in fact it may not create problems in reasoning with the COSMO either, since both are abstract entities and not PhysicalObjects, and thus not disjoint. But it will be good practice to keep the propositional meanings separate from what are explicit though abstract linguistic representations of the meanings, wherever the distinction is clear. NOTE that this abstract notion of Proposition should not be conflated with an AbstractText that expresses that Proposition in symbols (usually linguistic symbols). An abstract 'Proposition' is related to such a symbolic representation by the relation 'hasAbstractRepresentation'. SUMO: Propositions are Abstract entities that express a complete thought or a set of such thoughts. As an example, the formula '(instance Yojo Cat)' expresses the Proposition that the entity named Yojo is an element of the Class of Cats. Note that propositions are not restricted to the content expressed by individual sentences of a Language. They may encompass the content expressed by theories, books, and even whole libraries. It is important to distinguish Propositions from the ContentBearingObjects that express them. A Proposition is a piece of information, e.g. that the cat is on the mat, but a ContentBearingObject is an Object that represents this information. A Proposition is an abstraction that may have multiple representations: strings, sounds, icons, etc. For example, the Proposition that the cat is on the mat is represented here as a string of graphical characters displayed on a monitor and/or printed on paper, but it can be represented by a sequence of sounds or by some non-latin alphabet or by some cryptographic form. OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002\n A collection of intangible individuals. Each instance of #$Proposition is an abstract propositional thing that has some truth value in some context or world. A proposition is assumed to be representable (at least in principle) by a sentence in some formal or natural language. But it should _not_ be assumed that propositions are themselves intrinsically linguistic items in the way that sentences or formulae are. Indeed, propositions are often viewed as extra-linguistic, intensional entities that (while not sentences themselves) are represented or expressed by meaningful sentences (or, on some versions of this view, by concrete tokens of sentences). On such a view it is possible for distinct sentences (either from the same language or from different languages) to express the very same proposition; e.g. 'Snow is white', 'White is the color of snow', 'Schnee ist weiss'. (in German), and (arguably) '(#$relationAllInstance #$objectHasColor #$SnowMob #$WhiteColor)' (in CycL). Similarly, it is sometimes the case that a single sentence - when used in different contexts - will express distinct propositions; e.g. 'I am hungry.' said by you and said by me. Most formal languages (such as a first-order predicate calculus) and natural languages (such as English) include the resources for composing expressions that represent propositions from component expressions (that might or might not themselves represent other propositions).\n\nDOLCE: The abstract content of a proposition. Abstract content is purely combinatorial: from this viewpoint, any content that can be generated by means of combinatorial rules is assumed to exist in the domain of quantification (reified abstracts). Frrom Cyc: OPENCYC 1: MAY 23, 2002\nA specialization of #$AbstractInformationalThing. Each instance of #$Information-Content is an abstract object that can be the content, or meaning, of some token in some language. A pair of tokens of linguistic objects mean the same thing just in case each has the same content as the other. Instance of this collection can be used to represent the content of an instance of #$ConceptualWork. a metatype that can be used as an argument restriction for relations that take a subtype of ValuableThing as one of their arguments.. A Communication that involves the transfer of information via a LinguisticExpression. Generic 'Conversation' is a Communication between two or more IntelligentAgents that occurs with little time lag between sending and receipt of each unit Communication, and the expectation that each unit Communication from one Agent will receive a response after a brief interval from one of the other parties to the conversation. In COSMO, unlike in Cyc, this general concept is not necessarily performed via speech acts, but can be accomplished by sign language, by writing on paper in the presence of another, by texting,over modern cell phones, by instant messaging, or by rapid exchange of emails among two or more parties who are all on-line at the same time, or by any other means of rapid, real-time communication. For purely oral conversation, use 'OralConversation'. Cyc: Every #$Conversation includes at least two #$CommunicationAct-Single as #$subEvents, with the #$senderOfInfo in one being the #$recipientOfInfo in the other. Each AgreeingEvent is a Conversation between two parties that results in an Agreement, which is a mental object. In each AgreeingEvent, at least one party conveys a Promise to the other, to do something in the future. Therfore an 'AgreeingEvent' is not merely a conversation in which the parties 'agree' on some facts - this type of Event creates an Agreement to do something. A collection of complex information transfer events. Each instance of #$MultiDirectionalCommunication is an event in which more than one agent plays the #$communicatorOfInfo role. For example, a conversation or a debate, as opposed to a speech or lecture. The predicate #$infoContributed is used to correlate each sending agent with the information s/he transmits in such an event. For communication acts having only one sender, see #$CommunicationAct-Single. bd5891c4-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 The transfer of information from one or more IntentionalAgents or Automatons (e.g. automated communications devices) to one or more other IntentionalAgents. COSMO NOTE: that 'Communication' in COSMO is a subtype of 'InformationTransferEvent' in which some IntelligentAgent must be the intented recipient. Not every creation of an Information BearingThing (IBT) is a 'Communication', but jotting a note for one's own purposes is a Communication, even if no one else is intended to see it, because there is an intended recipient - but the creator and recipient are the same agent. Communication(SUMO) communication-event(DOLCE) SUMO: ('Communication') A SocialInteraction that involves the transfer of information between two or more CognitiveAgents. Note that Communication is closely related to, but essentially different from, ContentDevelopment. The latter involves the creation or modification of a ContentBearingObject, while Communication is the transfer of information for the purpose of conveying a message. SUMO partitions 'Communication' into: Stating Supposing Directing Committing Expressing Declaring. SUMO: relatedInternalConcept Communication ContentDevelopment. In Cyc called 'Communicating': Cyc: A specialization of #$PurposefulAction and characterized by one or more #$InformationTransferEvent sub-events. Each instance of #$Communicating is an event in which the transfer of information between or among agents is a focal action; communicating is the main purpose and/or goal in the event. That may be contrasted with events which involve communication but wherein the focus is different, e.g., playing cards (wherein the progressive actions - and winning - of the game are focal). Since #$Communicating is a specialization of #$PurposefulAction, each #$Communicating event must be intentional on the part of the #$communicatorOfInfo; it may or may not be intentional on the part of the agent playing the #$infoCommunicatedTo role. Hence, a speaker on a soapbox haranguing an indifferent crowd is performing an instance of #$Communicating. In contrast, Juliet soliloquizing on her balcony, unaware that Romeo is listening to her, is not #$Communicating; rather Romeo (and Juliet, unaware) are engaged in an #$Eavesdropping. Communicating may be either a one-way or a two-way transfer of information (cf. #$CommunicationAct-Single, #$MultiDirectionalCommunication). Every event belonging to #$Communicating contains at least one transfer of information between at least two agents who participate in the event. (Note that the latter requirement excludes reading and writing from #$Communicating, when those events are just the private accessing or generating of information.) Communicating may be specialized in various ways, such as, by the method or medium used (e.g., #$AudioCommunicating, #$NonVerbalCommunicating, #$FaceToFacePresenceCommunicating); by the type of information involved (e.g., #$MakingAnAgreement); by the purpose of the communication (e.g., #$Teaching, #$Negotiating); by the agents involved (e.g., #$IntraOrganizationCommunication, #$StageProduction). Examples of #$Communicating include a symphony performance, an email message, a telephone call, a speech, a handshake, issuing a traffic ticket - all of which normally, and focally, involve communication between two or more agents. bd589f07-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 The SUMO term for the general event of 'Communication'. COSMO note: removed 'compositePhysicalAndMentalEvent' as parent - we want to reserve that for individual actions, but a SocialOccurrence has multiple participants, and requiring specifying each agent is impractical. Cyc: A specialization of both #$PurposefulAction and #$CompositePhysicalAndMentalEvent. Each instance of #$SocialOccurrence is an action in which two or more agents take part. In many cases, #$SocialOccurrences involve communication among the participating agents. Some instances of #$SocialOccurrence have very elaborate role structures (e.g. a typical lawsuit), while others have fairly simple role structures (e.g. greeting a colleague at work). COSMO note: Note that InformationTransferPhysicalEvent, which may be carried out by machines at both ends, is also classified as a SocialOccurrence, since such communication is at this time (2007) always performed at the direction of a Person. NOTE also that the 'Agents' directly performing this action do not have to be people or organizations, they can be machines or software agents. bd588f3b-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A specialization of #$AnimalActivity. Each instance of #$HumanActivity is a spatially-localized action each of whose doers (see #$doneBy) is either a #$HomoSapiens or a group of humans (i.e. a #$Group all of whose members are #$HomoSapiens or groups of humans). bd588deb-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A specialization of #$Action. Each instance of #$AnimalActivity is a spatially-localized action, each of whose doers (see #$doneBy) is either an #$Animal or a group of animals (i.e. a #$Group all of whose members are #$Animals). bd588daa-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A specialization of both #$Action (q.v.) and #$Event-Localized. Every instance of #$AnimateActivity is a spatially-localized action, each of whose doers (see #$doneBy and #$animateDoers) is either a #$BiologicalLivingObject or a group of BLOs (i.e. a #$Group all of whose members are BLOs). Specializations of this collection include #$AnimalActivity, #$BiologicalEvent, and #$PhysiologicalProcess. SUMO A normal process of an Organism or part of an Organism. 31d87aae-5580-41d7-8025-c8e9f7c3ffca A Group consisting exclusively of Agents, which may be individuals (people), or Organizations, or GroupsOfPeople. The most common AgentGroups will be groups of people, but there are also groups of Organizations (The United Nations, a Chamber of Commerce) and groups that are of mixed types (a company's customers may be individuals and organizations). Each GroupOfAnimals is Group, each component element of which is an Animal (including people. For a group of non-human animals,use 'GroupOfBeasts'). There must be more than one animal in this kind of Group. This includes GroupOfPeople as a subtype. hadTransferredItem relates a GeneralizedTransfer event to the thing transferred during the Event. Note that more than one thing may be transferred in an Event, and in particular each Transaction has at least two things transferred. This is a Case role for the GeneralizedTransfer event, which includes specializations such as Communication or property transfer. Things that are tranferred may be abstract or tangible, so the range is not restricted. A specialization of #$Event. Each instance of #$GeneralizedTransfer is an event in which something (tangible or intangible) is transferred from one 'place' to another. #$GeneralizedTransfer includes changes in physical location, in ownership or possession, transfer of information, and propagation of wave phenomena through space. See also the related predicate #$transferredThing, and the specializations of this collection. bd588eb6-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 go go go1v A specialization of #$GeneralizedTransfer. Each instance of #$InformationTransferEvent is an event in which information is transferred from a source (#$informationOrigin) to one or more destinations (#$informationDestination), where the source and the various destinations are either intelligent agents or #$InformationBearingThings (IBTs). Examples include reading a book (transfer of information from the book to the reader), saying something to someone (transfer of information from the speaker to the listener), machine translation (transfer of information from an encoded IBT in the source language to an encoded IBT in the target language), OCR scanning (transfer of information from a visual information source to another IBT in a different format), carving initials in a tree (transfer of information from an agent to an IBT), and making a speech (transfer of information from an agent to other agents). See also the specialization #$InformationTransferPhysicalEvent. NOTE that information can be transferred from a person's mind to a piece of paper, so the destination of the transfer does not have to be an IntelligentAgent, and an InformationTransfer does not have to be a 'Communication'. COSMO note; why is information transfer not always a PhysicalEvent in Cyc see 'InformationTransferPhysicalEvent'? Perhaps so that spirit communication can be included? In SUMO the appproximate equivalent of 'ContentBearingProcess'. SUMO: ('ContentBearingProcess') Any Process, for example ManualHumanLanguage, which may contain a Proposition. bd589f07-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A specialization of #$AtLeastPartiallyMentalEvent. Each instance of #$CompositePhysicalAndMentalEvent is an event that involves some mental event(s), as well as some interaction between physical objects. Each instance will thus have at least one #$PhysicalEvent as a sub-event. (It may or may not itself be an instance of #$PhysicalEvent, depending on whether it occurs at a specific spatial location.) Examples include a news broadcast program, a court trial, someone inheriting property, someone writing a letter, a physical examination, and a charity ball. Notable specializations of this collection include #$PurposefulPhysicalAction and #$SensoryEvent. bd588d27-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 The collection of #$CompositePhysicalAndMentalEvents that are performed purposively (see #$performedBy). This collection is the collection-intersection of #$PurposefulAction and #$CompositePhysicalAndMentalEvent. Since each instance of #$PurposefulPhysicalAction is also an instance of #$CompositePhysicalAndMentalEvent, each instance has both a mental and a physical component. Driving a car would be an instance of #$PurposefulPhysicalAction since it involves mental and physical functioning on the part of the performing agent and is done purposively. Crashing a car, conversely, would not normally be an instance (unless the driver purposefully caused the crash). beb39562-9c29-11b1-9dad-c379636f7270 A Group consisting exclusively of PhysicalObjects. One may consider the collection of disjoint parts of a physical object as a Group, but in doing so one must ignore the relations among the objects, so the ObjectGroup consisting of the parts of a connected PhysicalObject is not identical to the whole object itself. In SUMO, this is called a 'Collection'. NO identical Cyc class seems to be defined. SUMO: Collections have members like Classes, but, unlike Classes, they have a position in space-time and members can be added and subtracted without thereby changing the identity of the Collection. Some examples are toolkits, football teams, and flocks of sheep. wasPerformedByAgent points from a type of Action to the type of Agent that performs that type of Action. This relation is used to add detail to certain action types that include in their meanings that they are performed by a certain type of Agent. This 'perform' relation includes the 'experiencer' case role for mental events.