{"id":73,"date":"2008-03-20T23:38:22","date_gmt":"2008-03-21T04:38:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/2008\/03\/20\/ontology-of-time-in-progress-amounts-needed\/"},"modified":"2018-12-18T12:48:23","modified_gmt":"2018-12-18T17:48:23","slug":"ontology-of-time-in-progress-amounts-needed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/haleyai.com\/wordpress\/2008\/03\/20\/ontology-of-time-in-progress-amounts-needed\/","title":{"rendered":"Ontology of time in progress – amounts needed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recent posts on money<\/a> and time<\/a> have produced some excellent comments and correspondence.\u00a0 There is even recent OMG effort that is right on the money, at least concerning time.\u00a0 For details, see the Date-Time Foundational Vocabulary RFP<\/a>.\u00a0 I am particularly impressed with SBVR “Foundation” Vocabularies<\/a>, which I understand Mark Linehan of IBM presented last week at an OMG meeting in DC[1]<\/sup>.<\/p>\n

Mark’s suggestions include establishing standard upper ontologies for:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Time & dates<\/li>\n
  2. Monetary amount<\/li>\n
  3. Location<\/li>\n
  4. Unit of measure<\/li>\n
  5. Quantities, cardinalities, and ratios<\/li>\n
  6. Arithmetic operations<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I will skip operations for now since they are not taxonomic concepts but functional relationships involving such concepts.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It only touched on the more general concept of amounts that I will focus on here.<\/p>\n

    The remaining concepts are common to almost every application conceivable.\u00a0 They are some of the most primitive, domain-independent concepts of a critical and practical upper ontology.\u00a0 They include:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Time<\/li>\n
    2. Amounts<\/li>\n
    3. Numbers<\/li>\n
    4. Location<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Notice that money is not listed, nor are units of measure.\u00a0 For more details, read on and consider the sections on “units as constants” and “much versus many” here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

      Also note that cardinalities and ratios are simply numbers.\u00a0 Consider, for now, an amount as a number and unity of measure.\u00a0 I’m treating amounts and numbers as quantities.\u00a0 That is, a quantity is either a number or an amount.\u00a0 Taking this view, the order of ontological development could be expressed as:<\/p>\n

        \n
      1. Time<\/li>\n
      2. Numbers<\/li>\n
      3. Units of Measure<\/li>\n
      4. Amounts<\/li>\n
      5. Quantities<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        As we will discuss below and as I have discussed previously, however, units of measure are amounts, so the preceding is tautological.\u00a0 Moreover, modeling quantities after modeling amounts (which includes or requires modeling numbers) is so trivial that is not worth mentioning.\u00a0 Therefore, the order and focus I recommend is:<\/p>\n

          \n
        1. Numbers<\/li>\n
        2. Amounts<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

          And in modeling amounts, we will model “stuff” like time, money, and distance.<\/p>\n

          Amounts before time<\/strong><\/h3>\n

          An ontology that covers time also needs amounts.\u00a0 For example, what separates one point in time (or a date) from another point in time (or another date)?\u00a0 The difference is an amount of time.\u00a0 In other words, we will not model time well without first understanding (and subsequently modeling) what an amount is.\u00a0<\/p>\n

          But to model an amount, one needs to model stuff.\u00a0 And to discuss an amount, one needs to be able to state how much stuff some stuff is.\u00a0 That is, one needs to say that an amount of stuff is a number of reference amounts of stuff.\u00a0 For example, the amount of time it takes to read this second can be measured by a number of seconds.\u00a0 Of course, a second is also an amount of time.\u00a0 But it is an amount that we all understand so we can use it as a reference.\u00a0 None of us really knows how much an inch is, but we know enough about it that we now a twenty five inch newborn would be pretty long.<\/p>\n

          Authority could not model stuff.\u00a0 Its concepts were implemented only to handle concepts labeled by common count nouns and instances of such concepts.\u00a0 Any new concept had to be one of the following:<\/p>\n

          \"authoritycountnounconcepts.gif\"<\/a><\/p>\n

          There was no way to model “steel” or “water” or any other mass noun.\u00a0 As we will discuss, we cheated our way out of this by modeling:<\/p>\n