Act of Artifact Processing definition seems too restrictive for subclasses

[swartik]

The definition of Act of Artifact Processing is:

A Planned Act of performing a series of mechanical or chemical operations on something in order to change or preserve it.

For subclasses such as Act of Construction and Act of Manufacturing, I'm unclear what the something is that's changed or preserved.

• Act of Construction uses construction of an airport as an example. The land on which the airport is to be sited is changed; is that the "something"?
• Act of Manufacturing creates artifacts, possibly from raw materials. This doesn't necessarily change or preserve raw materials. The act can convert them into something else.

I think my issue may be the definition's use of singular: "something" and "it". Given the class's name, I would expect the something to be an artifact. Obviously it's not.

Here is a suggested revised definition:

A Planned Act of performing a series of mechanical or chemical operations, the output of which is new, changed, preserved, or destroyed artifacts.

("Destroyed" occurred to me because I recently worked on a project concerned in part with disassembling nuclear weapons.)

[cameronmore]

I concur, a good clarifying change.

[neilotte]

@swartik @cameronmore I believe the intent is that there is an identified object that is a workpiece, which is to be distinguished from byproducts and other incidentals that are changed in the course of the process. I don't think it makes sense to say that an artifact that has been intentionally destroyed has been 'processed'. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_processes "Industrial processes are procedures involving chemical, physical, electrical, or mechanical steps to aid in the manufacturing of an item or items, usually carried out on a very large scale. Industrial processes are the key components of heavy industry."

I think improvements can be made here, but I would not add 'destroy' as an option. Processes of destruction may be accommodated under a separate class.

[cameronmore]

Looking at the Cyber Ontology, I found Act of Artifact Destruction, defined as "An Act of Artifact Processing that consists of destroying some Artifact." If we expand our interpretation of 'change' in the definition of Artifact Processing, then this might be a properly asserted subclass, but maybe it should be a sibling. In any event, this should be raised in that forum and coordinated between the ontologies (Cyber Ontology Repo)