An Axiomatisation of Basic Formal Ontology with Projection Functions

This paper proposes a reformulation of the treatment of boundaries, fiat parts and aggregates of entities in Basic Formal Ontology. These are currently treated as mutually exclusive, which is inadequate for biological representation since some entities may simultaneously be fiat parts, boundaries and/or aggregates. We introduce functions which map entities to their boundaries, fiat parts or aggregations. We make use of time, space and spacetime projection functions which, along the way, allow us to develop a simple temporal theory.