Ontology of Time and Situoids in Medical Conceptual Modeling

Time, events, changes, and processes play a major role in medical conceptual modeling. Representation of time-structures and reasoning about time-oriented medical data are important theoretical and practical research areas. We assume that a formal representation of temporal knowledge must use as a framework some top-level ontology which describes the most general categories of temporal entities. In the current paper we discuss an ontology of time and situoids which is part of the top-level ontology GFO (General Formal Ontology) being developed by the Onto-Med research group [1]. The expressive power of GFO and its usability in conceptual modeling is tested by Onto-Med by carrying out a number of case studies in several fields of medicine and biomedicine. In the present paper we report on results of reconstructing the temporal-abstraction ontology presented by Y. Shahar [2] within GFO. In carrying out this investigation it turns out that a number of aspects in [2] needs further clarification and foundation.