Towards an ontology of portions of matter to support multi-scale analysis and provenance tracking
This provides a foundational ontology for scientific and industrial domains to track matter provenance, but it is incremental as it builds on existing UFO frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of representing portions of matter for multi-scale analysis and provenance tracking by developing an ontology under the Unified Foundational Ontology, introducing concepts like the granuleOf relation and applying it in a geology case study for the Oil & Gas industry.
This paper presents an ontology of portions of matter with practical implications across scientific and industrial domains. The ontology is developed under the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO), which uses the concept of quantity to represent topologically maximally self-connected portions of matter. The proposed ontology introduces the granuleOf parthood relation, holding between objects and portions of matter. It also discusses the constitution of quantities by collections of granules, the representation of sub-portions of matter, and the tracking of matter provenance between quantities using historical relations. Lastly, a case study is presented to demonstrate the use of the portion of matter ontology in the geology domain for an Oil & Gas industry application. In the case study, we model how to represent the historical relation between an original portion of rock and the sub-portions created during the industrial process. Lastly, future research directions are outlined, including investigating granularity levels and defining a taxonomy of events.