Re: SUO: 2000-7-26 example - nature of organisation
Chris,
I agree that Part is too specialized a relation for what you need:
CP> I agree that there is a nice distinction to be made between
ownership and
> part involving assets of a company.
> However in a more general framework it makes sense to give similar things a
> similar treatment.
> The problem I have been having with treating assets as part of a company is
> we do not seem to do this for people. Your car is not part of you etc. Maybe
> we should do this for people? Anyway, it would be pleasing to get a way of
> looking at these that treated them consistently across the kinds of things
> that can own things - or a good explanation why not.
In Ch. 2 of my KR book, I use a general dyadic relation, which
I named Has, to represent Whitehead's notion of prehension.
The Has relation represents the general Role, which can be
either a prehending entity, a prehended entity, or both (in which
case it is a correlative).
Frank Farance criticized my Has relation because it is "ambiguous".
But it is not at all ambiguous; rather, it is so general that it
includes very many special cases under it -- in fact, it includes
almost everything to which one might use the English verb "has"
plus some noun, such as "part", "possession", "child", "husband",
"asset", "participant", "agent", etc.
For an excerpt from Ch. 2, see my web page on roles and relations:
http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/roles.htm
For more information about the thematic roles, which are subtypes
of "Participant", which is a subtype of Part, which is a subtype of
"Prehended Entity", see:
http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/thematic.htm
For more information about agents in particula, see:
http://www.jfsowa.com/ontology/agents.htm
John Sowa