Voids and material constitution across physical granularities

Abstract

The relation between an object and its matter is fundamental to all physical sciences, and represented widely and diversely in scientific ontologies. An under-appreciated aspect of this relation is the emergence of voids at finer levels of physical granularity. In this paper we enhance the constitution relation to account for the presence of finer voids, and show how this helps delineate two forms of constitution that hold within and between granular levels. This enhanced notion of the constitution relation is characterized formally, and is applied to hydro ontology development.