Re: Advancing translational research with the Semantic Web

On May 18, 2007, at 1:03 PM, samwald@gmx.at wrote:

> The specific difficulties with the location of objects and  
> processes are to some degree inherent in the current OWL versions  
> of BFO and the Relation Ontology. They make it a bit difficult to  
> create statements that relate processes to certain locations and  
> force you to make statements about the participants of the process  
> instead.

Could you elaborate on this? My understanding is that according to  
BFO, pretty much everything about a process is determined by the  
participants (the process is existentially dependent on the  
participants). Although I recently noticed what I consider an oddity  
in the Relations in Biomedical Ontologies paper : c exists_at t =  
[definition] for some p, p has_participant c at t, which would seem  
to make the process primary.(I'm not actually sure why this predicate  
is needed if we already have instance_of)

-Alan