Brown Bag: Artefacts and Roles: Modeling Strategies in a Multiplicative Ontology
Comments on our Brown Bag reading:
L. Vieu, S. Borgo, and C. Masolo. Artefacts and Roles: Modeling Strategies in a Multiplicative Ontology. In Proceeding of the 2008 conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference (FOIS 2008), pages 121–134. IOS Press, 2008.
On Entity Stacking:
Entity stacking is based on multiple layers: amount of matter that constitutes physical objects that in turn constitute the (newly introduced) physical artefact.
It is rooted in ontologies (e.g. DOLCE).
It is also a kind of reification, entities on different layers are reified entities of constitutions of the lower layer entities.
On Property Reification:
Property Reification describes the treatment of properties as individual entities.
It heavily relies on the chosen formalism (FOL, DL, …). Higher-order logics do not require a reification of properties.
On Capacities:
Capacities are dispositional qualities of objects, i.e., they only exist in respect to something else.
Capacities are (other than affordances) independent of agents.
An attributed capacity is an intentional capacity that is assigned (by an agent) to an object. However, it does not require the agent to be present to hold the capacity.
Capacities are essential properties of physical artefacts.
On Physical Artefacts:
They are introduced as an additional top-level category and refer to an additional layer in the ontology.
They are put on top of amount of matter and physical objects.
Issues discussed and open questions:
Multiplicative Ontology is arbitrary, there is no natural set of entities.
The reification of entities leads to more entities and a more multiplicative ontology. There are even different ways to reify. Hence, modeling multiplicative ontology is arbitrary.
What are the identity criteria for the entities on different layers? Or what are the identity criteria of reified entities. They depend up to a certain (uncertain) extend on their constituting entities, but they always have additional, individual identity criteria.
Difference between inherence of roles and entity stacking does not become fully clear. Why do we need a distinction? Isn’t a role another layer in the stack? paperweight as role inhering in a pebble versus paperweight as physical artefact constituted by the pebble.
Interesting notion of artefact types (a design) compared to individual artefacts (a prototype)
