Matter Substance Hierarchy

[g-guenther]

First, congratulations to this quite comprehensive material ontology - it is a very nice approach!

Second, could you explain why you don't arrange AmorphousMaterial and CrystallineMaterial (maybe together with a new class PolycrystallineMaterial) in some class (e.g. StructuredMaterial) as they exclude each other?

Third, why do you make OrdinaryMatter and Substance separate classes instead of making Substance an exact synonym for OrdinaryMatter? Wouldn't that simplify things?

Fourth, did you consider to place your nice ontology somewhere into the BFO top level hierarchy to be more interoperable with other ontologies?

[jesper-friis]

Thanks. In the resent versions (1.0.0-beta5 and 1.0.0-beta7) we do have a classification of materials (under ClassicallyDefinedMaterial) that includes AmorphousMaterial and CrystallineMaterial. However, this branch needs more work, including better elucidations and anchoring it in a de-facto reference.

OrdinaryMatter and Substance focuses of different aspects of matter. OrdinaryMatter excludes anti-matter, while the only requirement of substance is that it is a matter made of fermions (i.e. it has mass and occupy space). Material inherits from both.

EMMO is a top-level ontology anchored in mereocausality from which space and time is derived. It is intrinsically 4D and allows to describe objects in their full extend in space and time. The top-level split between continuant and occurent in BFO makes a direct alignment between EMMO and BFO very difficult. However, there was done a great work in the OntoCommons CSA project to align DOLCE, BFO and EMMO. A part of this work was reported in https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10296887.