Onto-Med >> Theories >> GFO Part I Basic Principles

Overview

General Formal Ontology (GFO)

Next: 9.1 Property Universals and Up: General Formal Ontology (GFO) Previous: 8.4 Process Classifications

9 Properties

Things can have certain characteristics. To express them, natural and artificial languages make use of syntactic elements like adjectives / adverbs, or attributes / slots, respectively. Examples are: the severity of a rhinitis (a severe or minor); the shape of a nose (bulbous, pointy, flattened); the size of a filing cabinet; the size of a clinical trial (the number of participating patients); the number of centers comprising mono- and multi-center trials; the age of a patient (which may affect the inclusion or the exclusion in a trial); the reputation of a university.

In the following, we present the GFO account on properties, which consists of two parts: First, the distinction between abstract property universals and their concrete instances, which are called property individuals.²¹Second, both property universals and property and individuals must be distinguished from their respective values.

• 9.1 Property Universals and Their Values
• 9.2 Property Individuals and Their Values
• 9.3 Classification of Property Universals