Recent posts on money and time have produced some excellent comments and correspondence. There is even recent OMG effort that is right on the money, at least concerning time. For details, see the Date-Time Foundational Vocabulary RFP. I am particularly impressed with SBVR “Foundation” Vocabularies, which I understand Mark Linehan of IBM presented last week at an OMG meeting in DC[1].
Mark’s suggestions include establishing standard upper ontologies for:
- Time & dates
- Monetary amount
- Location
- Unit of measure
- Quantities, cardinalities, and ratios
- Arithmetic operations
I will skip operations for now since they are not taxonomic concepts but functional relationships involving such concepts. I believe the post on CEP and BPM covered time in adequate detail and the post on Siebel’s handling of foreign exchange covered the currency exchange aspects of money. It only touched on the more general concept of amounts that I will focus on here.
The remaining concepts are common to almost every application conceivable. They are some of the most primitive, domain-independent concepts of a critical and practical upper ontology. They include: Continue reading “Ontology of time in progress – amounts needed”