prov:Influences: continuants or occurrents?

[tmprd]

• The definition of Influence suggests it's some kind of dependent continuant.

  "Influence is the capacity of an entity, activity, or agent to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of another by means of usage, start, end, generation, invalidation, communication, derivation, attribution, association, or delegation."

• However, some subclasses of Influence, such as Generation, are also subclasses of InstantaneousEvent, which in turn we have classified as a process boundary (an Occurrent).

• Other subclasses of Influence, such as Communication and Derivation, could be interpreted as happening over time, so we've tried classified those as a process.

  • But Since process and process boundary are disjoint, that means Influence would need to be a disjoint union of these (either but not both).

• However, one example asserts that an instance of prov:Entity, which we've classified as a continuant, is implied to also be an instance of EntityInfluence, in virtue of being the domain of a prov:entity relation (not to be confused with the prov:Entity class). Again, suggesting that influences are continuants. Here is the example:

  :digestedProteinSample1
  a prov:Entity;
  prov:wasDerivedFrom :proteinSample;
  prov:qualifiedDerivation [
    a prov:Derivation;
    prov:hadUsage [
       a prov:Usage;
       prov:entity :Trypsin;
      prov:hadRole :treatmentEnzyme;
    ];
  ];
  prov:entity :proteinSample;
  .
  :proteinSample a prov:Entity .

Conclusion: There are many confusing aspects of these classifications, but fundamentally to make the alignment consistent with PROVO's example data, we need to split up some subclasses of Influence as either continuant or occurrent but not both. Could Influence be disjoint union between these (maybe, e.g. process boundary and disposition)? Any problems with that?

[tmprd]

Here's what happens when we try to change the ontology to fit the natural language definition of Influence as a "capacity". Removing InstantaneousEvent as a superclass of Generation, Invalidation, Start, End, & Usage is necessary to make this a continuant (though not an option for the scope of this project). However, re-classifying Influence as a continuant still results in several contradictions with the example data.

Meanwhile, treating Influence as a process results in 1 contradiction, posted above. I'm inclined to think this example :digestedProteinSample1, contrary to what's implied, is not both an Entity (continuant) and an EntityInfluence (occurrent). Actually, a digested protein sample is neither a capacity nor a process. Therefore, I think our best chance is to ignore this example and interpret all influences as processes. What justifies ignoring this example? First, there's only one of these. Second, there is a precedent: another PROVO example contradicts PROVO itself (because it asserts something is an Entity, while implying its an Activity, while asserting Entity and Activity are disjoint).

Finally, what explains the intuition that Influence is a capacity is that the authors were thinking of Influence as necessarily involving a relation to some Agent. This is better explained by agents being participants in influences as processes.