Capabilities: An Ontology
This work addresses the need for a general ontology of capabilities to support ontology-based research in fields where such data are currently fragmented, though it appears incremental in building on existing disposition concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of defining and categorizing capabilities as a subset of dispositions, aiming to provide a robust ontological account that can unify siloed data collection efforts across various domains.
In our daily lives, as in science and in all other domains, we encounter huge numbers of dispositions (tendencies, potentials, powers) which are realized in processes such as sneezing, sweating, shedding dandruff, and on and on. Among this plethora of what we can think of as mere dispositions is a subset of dispositions in whose realizations we have an interest a car responding well when driven on ice, a rabbits lungs responding well when it is chased by a wolf, and so on. We call the latter capabilities and we attempt to provide a robust ontological account of what capabilities are that is of sufficient generality to serve a variety of purposes, for example by providing a useful extension to ontology-based research in areas where capabilities data are currently being collected in siloed fashion.