Submissions:Constituency/hasConstituent

From Odp

hasConstituent has Category:OntologyElement and is an element of Constituency

Name: hasConstituent

Type: owl:ObjectProperty

Description: Constituency depends on some layering of the world described by the ontology. For example, scientific granularity (e.g. body-organ-tissue-cell) or ontological 'strata' (e.g. social-mental-biological-physical) are typical layerings. Intuitively, a constituent is a part belonging to a lower layer. Since layering is actually a partition of the world described by the ontology, constituents are not properly classified as parts, although this kindship can be intuitive for common sense. Example of constituents include the wood pieces constituting a table, the persons constituting a social system, the molecules constituting a person, the atoms constituting a river, etc. In all these examples, we notice a typical discontinuity between the constituted and the constituent object: e.g. a table is conceptualized at a functional layer, while wood pieces are conceptualized at a material layer, a social system is conceptualized at a different layer from the persons that constitute it, a person is conceptualized at a different layer from the molecules that constitute them, and a river is conceptualized at a different layer from the atoms that constitute it. The object property isConstituentOf is its inverse.