Dear Matthew, (01)
MW
> State does not appear in ISO 15926, but I expect a state
> to be a temporal part of some whole life individual, and may
> have a non-zero temporal extent as well as a spatial extent. (02)
The concept of state is important for any ontology that involves time.
In fact, states and events are more basic than a metric notion of
time and space. They can be purely abstract relationships that are
independent of any physical realization or coordinate system. (03)
For example, in Chapter 4 of my book _Knowledge Representation_,
I use a very simple ontology (Petri nets) with four types of
entities: states, tokens, transitions, and events. (04)
Given that ontology, I define a clock as a Petri net with two
types of states (one called Ready and the other called Time).
The clock has one type of transition called Tick. Each event is
an instance of Tick. The number of tokens in the state called
Time is a count of the number of occurrences of Tick. (05)
This abstract definition (or any similar version that uses pure
FOL or other logic) gives you a way of discussing events and states
that is independent of any coordinate system (3D or 4D). It allows
you to define an abstract clock (and many other useful concepts)
for an open-ended variety of applications. (06)
John (07)
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