The Mereology of Stages and Persistent Entities

Since our world is populated by entities that persist through time and that change over time it is important to represent knowledge about those entities in a formal manner. In this paper a formal theory of the mereological structure of stages and persistent entities is presented. Stages are entities which exist only at a single moment in time. Persistent entities are entities which exist at more than one instant in time. Endurance and perdurance are identified as different modes of persistence. The underlying framework is a mereology of spacetime regions in which we can distinguish between spatial regions (i.e., regions of minimal temporal extend) and temporally extended regions. Time-slices are defined as maximal spatial regions and are used to describe the temporal properties of spacetime regions and the entities (endurants, perdurants, and stages) located at these regions.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ECAI
• Authors: Thomas Bittner, Maureen Donnelly
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, ECAI 2004, Entities, Persistent Entities, Spacetime Regions