From Causation (and Parthood) to Time: The Case of EMMO

Abstract

We investigate the construction of time in EMMO, a foundational ontology developed to improve the strictness in the representation of applied sciences’ knowledge. We show how temporal individuals and temporal relations can be defined from the primitives of causation and parthood, at the core of EMMO; we then prove that our construction satisfies van Benthem’s requirements for temporal structures. Our analysis contributes to clarifying the overall landscape of causal relational theories of time, and to the ongoing effort of aligning foundational ontologies. We conclude by sketching how our results can be generalised, employing a strategy to simulate relations’ transitive closure in FOL. This generalisation makes the described construction of time exploitable in ontology engineering with minimal preconditions and sets up the groundwork for a systematic analysis of the connections between (discrete) causal and temporal structures.