Abstract
Scale is of great importance to the analysis of real world phenomena, be they enduring objects or perduring processes. This paper presents a new perspective on the concept of scale by considering it within two complementary ontological views. The first, called SNAP, recognizes enduring entities or objects, the other, called SPAN, perduring entities or processes. Within the meta-theory provided by the complementary SNAP and SPAN ontologies, we apply different theories of formal ontology such as mereology and granular partitions, and ideas derived from hierarchy theory. These theories are applied to objects and processes and form the framework within which we present tentative definitions of scale, which are found to differ between the two ontologies.
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Reitsma, F., Bittner, T. (2003). Scale in Object and Process Ontologies. In: Kuhn, W., Worboys, M.F., Timpf, S. (eds) Spatial Information Theory. Foundations of Geographic Information Science. COSIT 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2825. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39923-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39923-0_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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