Description of mobile elements / building

Following my question on elevators, I would like to share thoughts that 
may (or may not?) lead to a small reform of the BOT ontology.

Consider boats: they can be true floating houses. They may have storeys, 
bedrooms, kitchen, bathrooms, electrical system, plumbing, heating 
system, and so on. They for sure qualify as entities that BOT would be 
good at modelling. Yet, they are mobile, and they are vehicles.

Going further, trains are vehicles that countain toilets, cabines, 
possibly retaurants, sometimes bedrooms, even storeys, etc. They should 
be zones with spaces.

Going further, an inter-terminal shuttle in an airport, being a train 
itself, could be modelled as a zone with spaces inside. But from the 
point of view of the airport, an inter-terminal shuttle is just like an 
elevator: an element that moves along a space that crosses several 
zones. A terminal is like a storey, except that it's not physically on 
top or below other terminals.

Considering the answers I had about elevator, the shuttle should be 
modelled as a bot:Element of the airport. But as I said, it could 
equally be a zone. From the point of view of the airport topology, the 
train is an element, while from its own internal perspective, the train 
is a zone with its own spaces.

So, this leads to my prooposal: coudn't we remove the disjointess axiom 
that currently holds between bot:Element and bot:Zone?

BTW, from the perspective of a 3D simulation application, it makes sense 
to navigate larger zones with elements that are themselves zones, 
because as soon as one enters a local element, the element becomes the 
reference frame and everything external can be ignored until going out 
of the element. This allows the application to handle very large zones 
as well as fine grained areas without performance issues.

BTW (2nd), the encapsuation of zones within elements leas to a 
hierarchical model of the environment that matches very well an abstract 
model for indoor navigation that a former student of mine proposed in 
his PhD dissertation.

BTW (3rd): think of a doll-house. It is an element in a child's bedroom, 
and a building with storeys and rooms.
-- 
Antoine Zimmermann
Institut Henri Fayol
École des Mines de Saint-Étienne
158 cours Fauriel
CS 62362
42023 Saint-Étienne Cedex 2
France
Tél:+33(0)4 77 42 66 03
Fax:+33(0)4 77 42 66 66
http://www.emse.fr/~zimmermann/
Member of team Connected Intelligence, Laboratoire Hubert Curien

Received on Wednesday, 30 January 2019 14:25:13 UTC