Abstract

While mereotopology -- the theory of boundaries, contact and separation built up on a mereological foundation -- has found fruitful applications in the realm of qualitative spatial reasoning, it faces problems when its methods are extended to deal with those kinds of spatial and non-spatial reasoning which involve a factor of granularity. This is because granularity cannot easily be represented within a mereology-based framework. We sketch how this problem can be solved by means of a theory of coarse-grained partitions, drawing on methods developed for the manipulation of partitions in the spatial realm and applying these to a range of partitions of non-spatial sorts. We then show how these same methods can be extended to apply to finite sequences of partitions evolving over time, or to what we shall call coarse- and fine-grained histories. Keywords: mereotopology, granularity, ontology, partitions, histories 1. Introduction As a result of a series of important contribut...

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