Relating some stuff to other stuff

Abstract

Traceability in food and medicine supply chains has to handle stuffs—entities such as milk and starch indicated with mass nouns—and their portions and parts that get separated and put together to make the final product. Implementations have underspecified ‘links’, if at all, and theoretical accounts from philosophy and in domain ontologies are incomplete as regards the relations involved. To solve this issue, we define seven relations for portions and stuff-parts, which are temporal where needed. The resulting theory distinguishes between the extensional and intensional level, and between amount of stuff and quantity. With application trade-offs, this has been implemented as an extension to the Stuff Ontology core ontology that now also imports a special purpose module of the Ontology of units of Measure for quantities. Although atemporal, some automated reasoning for traceability is still possible thanks to using property chains to approximate the relevant temporal aspects.