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On the Semantics of Ongoing and Future Occurrence Identifiers

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Book cover Conceptual Modeling (ER 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10650))

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Abstract

According to the standard wisdom, all temporal occurrences are considered as “frozen in time”. This means that all their properties are fully determined, and they can’t change. This is certainly true for historical occurrences, but, at least in the ordinary language, ongoing and future occurrences seem to admit the possibility of change: the score of an ongoing match may change in time, and a future trip may be delayed. But if ongoing and future events can change in time, what are their identifiers? In this paper I propose a tensed ontological account (contrasted with the dominant tenseless tradition) that provides an answer to this question.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We have a serious terminological issue here. In philosophy, multiple terms (e.g., perdurant, occurrent, event, eventuality...) have been used to denote what I have been calling so far an ‘occurrence’. Although the latter term is probably the least ambiguous, ‘event’ seems to be the most common, so, to better reflect the literature I will be citing, I will use it as a synonym of ‘occurrence’ from now on, ignoring that ‘event’ is also used in a stricter sense, in contraposition to states and processes.

  2. 2.

    ‘Being present’ is taken here as a primitive notion, which we can roughly understand as ‘being perceivable’. When we say that a time is present we assume to have some kind of perceivable clock that shows us what the present time is. A time interval is assumed to be present if it contains the present time.

  3. 3.

    I will be deliberately vague on this point. While a person may exist after her death without being present, arguably she does not exist before her conception. Similarly, a future medical appointment does not exist before it is decided. To account for these issues, a temporalized existence predicate might be introduced in addition to the temporalized presence predicate. Here I assume to quantify on things that exist.

  4. 4.

    The ‘glacier’ or ‘growing block’ metaphor is used in the philosophical literature to illustrate a position concerning the tensed theory of time [24].

  5. 5.

    In dolce, telic events are called accomplishments, while atelic events are distinguished into states and processes. Here, for the sake of simplicity, states are considered as a particular case of processes.

  6. 6.

    I will not discuss granularity issues here. Anyway, I am sympathetic with Galton’s position according to which a walking process would be present even at a time when the first step is still in the air, assuming that the intention to run remains constant.

  7. 7.

    Of course, a past episode must have been fully present previously. Once an episode of a given kind is aborted, it is not “registered” as an episode of that kind.

  8. 8.

    The fact that an episode and its realizing process are temporally co-located does not mean that they have the same temporal parts. For instance, a process of walking that happens to stop at the station is different from an episode of walking from home to the station, since the focal qualities [10] of the two events are different: some qualities of the station (its location) are in the focus of the latter, but not of the former.

  9. 9.

    Indeed, a popular distinction between objects and events is based on the fact that an object is wholly present whenever it is present, while an event is always partially present. These notions are notoriously difficult to formalize [5], while they are unproblematic under the present approach.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Giancarlo Guizzardi and Tiago Prince Sales for some interesting discussions that motivated the need for this approach. I am also very grateful to Antony Galton and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. Part of this work has been done in the framework of project ‘KAOS: Knowledge-Aware Operational Support’, funded by the Euregio Tirol-Südtirol-Trentino.

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  1. ISTC-CNR Laboratory for Applied Ontology, Trento, Italy

    Nicola Guarino

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  1. Nicola Guarino
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Correspondence to Nicola Guarino .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria

    Heinrich C. Mayr

  2. Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

    Giancarlo Guizzardi

  3. Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Hui Ma

  4. Valencia University of Technology, Valencia, Spain

    Oscar Pastor

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Guarino, N. (2017). On the Semantics of Ongoing and Future Occurrence Identifiers. In: Mayr, H., Guizzardi, G., Ma, H., Pastor, O. (eds) Conceptual Modeling. ER 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10650. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69904-2_36

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69904-2_36

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