Towards an Ontological Framework for Events as
Transitions among Situations
Fabrício H. Rodrigues1
1
    Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Av. Paulo Gama 110, Farroupilha, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil


Abstract
Events are broadly defined as things that happen in time involving continuants as participants
[1]. Besides that, there are some trends regarding the happening nature of events. One of them
is what we call the transition view, which regards an event as a transition among situations
(i.e., instantaneous, particular configurations of some part of reality that is understood as a
whole [2][3]). Another is what we call the manifestation view, according to which events are
manifestations of certain properties (in special, dispositions) of their participants [? ].
    Current ontologies offer rich support to build a great variety of intended models of events
according to this account, allowing the representation of changes in participants, of temporal
parts of events, of causation between events, and other aspects. However, they do not seem to
be so effective in constraining unintended models of events. In particular, they seem to lack
good criteria for deciding whether or not a given succession of situations corresponds to a
genuine event and for deciding which continuants participate in a given event at each time.
    If the role of ontologies involves carving reality at its joints, we believe that identifying
suitable constraints over the notion of event can reveal informative patterns to compose an
ontological framework to guide the process of analyzing and modeling this type of entity. Thus,
in this work, we adopt the transition view of events and propose the use of the notion of
system (i.e., a set of interconnected objects [4]) as the invariant element that is present in each
of the successive situations in the course of an event. With that, an event is the transition
among situations that consist in snapshots of a single system at different times and we say
that such a system delimits the event. The participants of the event are the components of
the invariant system and the connections that unify such a system are defined in terms of
the relationships between participants that contribute to activating the dispositions that are
manifested in the event. With that, we provide criteria to decide whether or not a succession of
situations correspond to a genuine event (i.e., being a succession of snapshots of a system) and
to decide which are the participants of an event at each time (i.e., the continuants that are part
of the delimiting system at the time).
    Based on that, we have derived some types of event. Events may be open or closed according
to whether the system that delimits it is open or closed to the entry/exit of components and/or

FOIS 2021 Early Career Symposium (ECS), held at FOIS 2021 - 12th International Conference on Formal Ontology in
Information Systems, September 13-17, 2021, Bolzano, Italy
" fabricio.rodrigues@inf.ufrgs.br (F. H. Rodrigues)
 0000-0002-0615-8306 (F. H. Rodrigues)
                                       © 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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amounts of basic ontological substrate (i.e., the stuff that ultimately constitutes objects [5]). In
the case of open events, we also have auxiliary events corresponding entry/exit of participants.
Besides that, we have derived 5 types of event according to the pattern of variation among the
situations (i.e., stasis, qualitative change, identity change, creation, and destruction) [5]. Finally,
we intend to apply this framework to model both natural events (e.g., geological processes) and
artificial ones (e.g., manufacturing processes).


Acknowledgments
This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível
Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001 and Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento
Científico e Tecnolóogico (CNPq).


References
[1] F. H. Rodrigues, M. Abel, What to consider about events: A survey on the ontology of
    occurrents, Applied Ontology 14 (2019) 343–378. doi:10.3233/AO-190217.
[2] G. Guizzardi, G. Wagner, R. de Almeida Falbo, R. Guizzardi, J. Almeida, Towards ontological
    foundations for the conceptual modeling of events, in: Proceedings of the International
    Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2013), Springer, 2013, pp. 327–341.
[3] J. Barwise, The Situation in Logic, Center for the Study of Language (CSLI), 1989.
[4] M. Bunge, Treatise on Basic Philosophy: Ontology II: A World of Systems, volume 4, D.
    Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland, 1979.
[5] F. H. Rodrigues, J. L. Carbonera, M. Abel, Upper-level types of occurrent based on the
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