On 10/23/2012 6:59 PM, William Frank wrote:
> I find it troubling that a /place/ is a kind of thing, yet a/date/time/
> is a "data type," and not a kind of thing. (01)
Space and time are the containers that hold everything in the universe.
A region in space or an interval of time could be considered physical.
In fact, quantum mechanics implies that even a region of outer space
that is a perfect vacuum would still have a "zero-point energy". (02)
But the coordinates of a location in space or time would be data.
I would classify dates and times in the same way as geographical
coordinates. (03)
In any case, I prefer the term 'entity' for the most general category
at the top of the hierarchy. Literally, an entity is anything that
exists or might exist. In CLIF, you could say (04)
(forall (x) (entity x)) (05)
In my preferred ontology, I would say that events exist, words exist,
relations exist, patches of colors exist, and information exists.
The term 'thing' sounds too concrete for them. So I prefer to
call them all entities. (06)
John (07)
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