IDEAS Foundation - Categories

The purpose of the IDEAS Foundation is to establish the lowest-level building blocks of the Ontology. The Foundation defines the basic ontic categories:

• Individual – anything that has a physical extent
• Type – a set of Individuals, Types or Tuples
• Tuple – a relationship between two or more Individuals, Types or Tuples
• Thing – an Individual, Type or Tuple (i.e. the most general category).

In addition, the Foundation specifies Couples which are tuples which have two places, and TupleTypes which are the types to which tuples belong.

These concepts are not always easily understood just from their definitions, especially if the reader is not familiar with ontology, so it helps to have examples. Examples of individuals are; you, me, my car, the earth, the Empire State Building, the act of me typing this, the Colossus of Rhodes and Henry the Eighth. Examples of types are; red things, VW Golfs, people, buildings, and ranks (which is a type whose members are types…think about it). Examples of tuples are; the relationship between my car and its engine (whole-part), red things and UK postboxes (sub-supertype) and red things and my car (type-instance).