Towards an ontology of portions of matter to support multi-scale analysis and provenance tracking

TL;DR

This paper develops an ontology of portions of matter based on the UFO framework, enabling multi-scale analysis and provenance tracking across scientific and industrial domains, exemplified through a geology case study.

Contribution

It introduces a novel ontology of portions of matter with the granuleOf relation and provenance tracking, grounded in the UFO ontology, for improved multi-scale analysis.

Findings

Demonstrated the ontology's application in geology for oil and gas industry.

Enabled tracking of matter provenance through historical relations.

Provided a foundation for future research on granularity and event taxonomy.

Abstract

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.