Internal note for the class Epistemic Location of a Physical Thing – C15  Back

Candidate

Internal note

Text

Former scope note :

This class comprises generic geographical locations of persistent items during a given time span.

Given the different ways persistent items are 'located' (human beings have legal domiciles but travel around, groups have registered head offices but could also move around, like the Swiss Federal Council having somewhere a meeting, and propositional objects are 'located' where their carriers, human or physical, bring them), an opportune typology will allow the different cases to be distinguished. In contrast, the localisation of temporal entities is not modelled with this class.

If the precise location of a persistent item is not known, it can be located in a relative position with respect to another entity whose location is known.

 

The location in relation to a building or other kind of construction is also possible using the correspondent property. In this case, the geographical location is provided by the geographical position of the construction itself.

in relation to a place on the surface of the Earth.

A location can also be a presence or inclusion in the given place, e.g. a geographical place situated within another or a person staying in a city. The geographical location of an object situated in a cave in the heart of a mountain, in a submarine or in a balloon has to be expressed in relation to geographical places situated on the surface of the earth or the seas.

This class is modelled as a subclass of sdh:C1 Entity Quality insofar as it does not represent a phenomenon in the sense of a spatio-temporal interaction of entities, i.e. a crm:E5 Event, but the position of a physical thing in relation to a geographical place intended as a time related quality. The intended spatial location is the main or macro position of the phisical thing during the given time-span. This means that the provided location is generally observable during the intended time-span even if at some point in time the entity is to be found in another location, e.g. a person going for a walk in the countryside, or an antique vase being loaned to another museum for an exhibition. If one needs to express these localisations of shorter duration, other instances of this same class must be created.

A dedicated vocabulary of types will allow to distinguish the different types of locations (e.g. presence in, inclusion, adjacency, outside of, etc.). In addition, a specific property allows to add the reason(s) for the localisation. This or these reason(s) are to be considered as valid for the whole period of localisation. For more complex situations, several instances of this same class or, rather, of other classes will be used to express the chronological evolution of the motivations of the geographical location of a physical entity. Furthermore, it should be noted that this class is explicitly aimed at expressing a physical location. To capture an official domicile, legal seat of an actor, etc. the sdh-so:C28 Social Location of an Actor class must be used.

 

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