A 4-Dimensionalist Top Level Ontology (TLO):

Mereotopology and Space-Time

This presentation describes what the 4-dimensionalist top level ontology (TLO) based upon mereotopology and space-time being developed for the Information Management Framework (IMF) looks like. It describes the agile, iterative, modular approach adopted. It situates the 4-dimensional approach in terms of its ontological choices. It outlines the scope of the first iteration, based upon requirements that emerge from industrial standards such as; Building Smart, STEP amd TC211/INSPIRE. It describes the spatio-temporal candidates for ontological analysis that emerge from these standards. It then provides a historical overview of the use of worldlines to characterise these candidates. And builds upon this for one example, coordinate systems. Finally it provides an overview of how space-time can be modularised. 

Presentation Structure

• Preliminaries - overall approach: How, broadly speaking, do we develop the ontology?
• Situating 4D in ontological space: A requirement for space-time is central
• Broad modularisation context
• First iteration: scope : What should the scope of the first ‘MVP’ be?
• Top-down and bottom-up approach
• Space-time – top-down workstream
• Space-time: Foundation Data Model : from worldlines to spatial objects and locations
• Space-time: top-level-ontology: from core to worldlines