Building Objects in Time - Spatio-temporal Approaches - page 19

According to [SMI 94, GRE 04]
*: the totality of the terms used in the literature is included in this diagram as synonyms, but it
should be noticed that for some philosophers there are nuances .
Figure 1.4. Categories of entities from the ontological point of view (in italics, some
examples related to a variety of objects (human beings and spatial units)
As highlighted by Bittner et al. [BIT 04] in an article proposing to develop an
ontological theory encompassing both the spatio-temporal process and the endurant
entities that are involved in it, the two entities are formally linked: a slice of the
perdurant entity corresponds to a state (in terms of existence and property) of the
endurant entity associated. Figure 1.5 illustrates the two points of view to
characterize the phenomenon of urban sprawl for a city in space and time. Galton
and Mizoguchi [GAL 09] advocate a related position, stressing the mutual
interdependence between matter and objects, on the one side, and events and
processes, on the other side, (that is to say, roughly, the two sets of entities
represented in Figure 1.4). Indeed, aging would not make sense without an object
undergoing this process. Table 1.2 proposes for a few thematic examples, couples of
endurant / perdurant entities that make sense together. On the one hand, the objects
with their properties, and on the other hand, the trajectories that these objects
describe in time under the action of processes and events. Vessels, such as endurant
entities, are thus associated with the crossings that they perform, which are
perdurant entities. Lakes and their saline property, endurant entities, are for their part
associated with the process of salinization, perdurant entity that implies an increase
in the salinity rate over time.