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

TL;DR

The paper addresses the challenge of modeling portions of matter across multiple scales and tracking their provenance. It adopts the Unified Foundational Ontology ($UFO$) and OntoUML to define a granule-based parthood, introducing the granuleOf relation and the Granule type, along with Granule Transfer events that ground historical relations such as $inheritsGranulesFrom$ and $subPortionOf$. It demonstrates these concepts through a geology/Oil & Gas case study, showing how granules migrate through quantities over time and how provenance can be inferred across three spatial/time scales. The work contributes a formal, domain-independent framework for representing matter entities as collections of granules that constitute portions, enabling precise data integration, reasoning, and provenance tracking in applications across geology, medicine, and materials science. It lays groundwork for extending granularity levels and event taxonomies and for incorporating negative parts (holes) in future research.

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.

Figures (10)

• Figure 1: Fragment of the UFO taxonomy, focusing on the top-level entities relevant to this work. Based on guizzardi2022ufo and fonseca2022incorporating. Colors are only a visual aid to help track distinct partitions of entities.
• Figure 2: OntoUML diagram showing the relation between granules, quantities, Object Types and Quantity Kinds.
• Figure 3: The water constitution and granules pattern.
• Figure 4: OntoUML diagram with the model of Collection of H2O and its anti-rigid specializations.
• Figure 5: Diagram of the Granule Transfer event, that occurs when a Inheritor Quantity receives granules from a Donor Quantity.