Not categories,
but perspectives.
What is new is a change of viewpoint. In our ontologies a concept is not a category to lock things into, but a perspective to look at them from: the same entity can be seen in several ways, each with its own reasoning rules, and the context picks the relevant one. This way the model embraces the polysemy of language instead of fighting it. Four examples, taken straight from the models.
- 01
What lasts and what happens
Continuant (what persists while keeping its identity) and occurrent (what happens and unfolds in time) are not declared disjoint. An exhibition can be described as something that fills three rooms and as something that runs from March to June, without splitting it into two different entities.
- 02
A speech act is both an event and information
When someone says “we open at nine tomorrow”, something happens (an event, with a speaker and a listener) and some content is passed on (information, about something). In the agents ontology the speech act is both, in the same entity, and it obeys the rules of each.
- 03
Selling and buying: one event, different words
In the frame ontology, perspective is a lexical fact, not an ontological one. A sale has all of its participants; “sell” and “buy” are words that bring different roles to the foreground. The model stays univocal, and the point of view lives in the choice of words.
- 04
Knowing what you don't know
The ontologies adopt the open world assumption: if an event has no start date, that does not mean it never began, only that we don't know when. This is what lets a system tell what it knows from what it doesn't, and say so.
Multiple classification is not a compromise: each perspective keeps its own axioms, and reasoning applies them all.