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Quantity Tropes and Internal Relations
In this article, we present a new conception of internal relations between quantity
tropes falling under determinates and determinables. We begin by providing a novel
characterization of the necessary relations between these tropes as basic internal
relations. The core ideas here are that the existence of the relata is sufficient for their
being internally related, and that their being related does not require the existence of
any specific entities distinct from the relata. We argue that quantity tropes are, as
determinate particular natures, internally related by certain relations of proportion and
order. By being determined by the nature of tropes, the relations of proportion and
order remain invariant in conventional choice of unit for any quantity and give rise to
natural divisions among tropes. As a consequence, tropes fall under distinct
determinables and determinates. Our conception provides an accurate account of
quantitative distances between tropes but avoids commitment to determinable
universals. In this important respect, it compares favorably with the standard
conception taking exact similarity and quantitative distances as primitive internal
relations. Moreover, we argue for the superiority of our approach in comparison with
two additional recent accounts of the similarity of quantity tropes
The Foundational Model of Anatomy Ontology
Anatomy is the structure of biological organisms. The term also denotes the scientific
discipline devoted to the study of anatomical entities and the structural and
developmental relations that obtain among these entities during the lifespan of an
organism. Anatomical entities are the independent continuants of biomedical reality on
which physiological and disease processes depend, and which, in response to etiological
agents, can transform themselves into pathological entities. For these reasons, hard copy
and in silico information resources in virtually all fields of biology and medicine, as a
rule, make extensive reference to anatomical entities. Because of the lack of a
generalizable, computable representation of anatomy, developers of computable
terminologies and ontologies in clinical medicine and biomedical research represented
anatomy from their own more or less divergent viewpoints. The resulting heterogeneity
presents a formidable impediment to correlating human anatomy not only across
computational resources but also with the anatomy of model organisms used in
biomedical experimentation. The Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) is being
developed to fill the need for a generalizable anatomy ontology, which can be used and
adapted by any computer-based application that requires anatomical information.
Moreover it is evolving into a standard reference for divergent views of anatomy and a
template for representing the anatomy of animals. A distinction is made between the FMA
ontology as a theory of anatomy and the implementation of this theory as the FMA
artifact. In either sense of the term, the FMA is a spatial-structural ontology of the
entities and relations which together form the phenotypic structure of the human
organism at all biologically salient levels of granularity. Making use of explicit
ontological principles and sound methods, it is designed to be understandable by human
beings and navigable by computers. The FMA’s ontological structure provides for
machine-based inference, enabling powerful computational tools of the future to reason
with biomedical data
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