material state

IRI: https://spec.industrialontologies.org/ontology/construct/MaterialState

Defined In: https://spec.industrialontologies.org/ontology/core/Core/

SubClass Of: bfo:process

Class Hierarchy

owl:Thing › bfo:entity › bfo:occurrent › bfo:process › material state

Direct subclasses:

Definition

process in which a material entity that participates in the process has a condition that remains unchanged

Explanatory Notes

  1. Although the notion of “particular condition”; has not been introduced in this release, the IOF’s approach will be to model this as a dependent entity such that at any timeframe during which it exists, it depends on some material entity – meaning a material state will necessarily “be focused on” a particular condition of some material entity for which the state is ascribed. Condition here would encompass BFO: specifically-dependent continuants (qualities, dispositions and other realizable entities types) as well as site (the absolute or relative location of a material entity). In the future, the coverage will be expanded to include some currently “missing dependent entity types”; including orientation, and cases wherein a material entity is in a particular condition because it has or is in particular composition or configuration (e.g. the setup action of a machine and jig is complete and it is not in a setup/ready-for-run state).

  2. Unchanging, is intended to encompass not just having a particular condition for the duration of the state, but potentially being value-bound to some constant or even within a given range as prescribed by some design or requirement specification. Specialized sub-types may be introduced to handle such value-based constant and range-bound states and conditions.

  3. The term as introduced here is not intended to be used for modeling what we might call the “state of a process” (e.g., equilibrium state for chemical, physical and biological processes or steady-state or discrete or continuous production processes), nor for modeling the states of non-real entities (e.g., virtual entities participating in virtual simulation program and any other informational or abstract entities, when they are considered to be in a particular condition). Extensions to the BFO framework as well as further work on ‘process characteristic’ may be first needed to handle these use cases and such specialized state classes will be introduced in a future release.

Examples

  • the lightswitch in the off state from 9 PM to 8 AM; the machine in fail state from 4 PM to 5 PM; perfusion bioreactor was run in steady state for two days, a truck is in a stop state because its position has been unchanged

Synonyms

  • stasis

Adapted From

  • Oxford Languages, term by the name ‘state’

Primitive Class

This class is declared primitive and it does not have necessary and sufficient condiftions defined.

Primitive Rationale

There are insufficient constructs to create necessary and sufficient conditions. Namely, constructs to formalize range,limits and constant values over a period of time are still lacking.

Formal Axioms

First-Order Logic Axioms 

MaterialState(x) → Process(x)

Semi-Formal Natural Language Axioms

if x is a ‘material state’ then x is a ‘process’

Description Logic

constr:MaterialState ⊑ bfo:process

SubClassOf: bfo:process