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cemeteries, see Fig. 6. They are impressive and have
been the subject of literary works and a theatre play.
Figure 6: Yellow non-car in Car cemetery photo – All the
cars in a cemetery are identifiable as such. Although one
cannot tell that the yellow one is for sure a non-car, its
overall condition leads us to think so.
Photo: Norbert Aepli, published under the license "Creative
Commons Attribution 3.0".
A non-car’s ontology for a car rescued from the
cemetery – say the bright yellow little car – to be a
collector’s item is shown in Fig. 7.
Figure 7: Collector’s Non-car partial pluggable ontology –
It is a non-car since the driving functionality was removed,
perhaps by removing the battery – plugged-in
cardinality=0. It serves only as a collector’s item – as
shown plugged-in in the iSocket.
5 DISCUSSION
The pragmatic implications of non- concepts refer to
design of systems of a few kinds: a) variety of
models; b) removable parts. In such cases, one could
use abstract sockets to explicitly manipulate parts
with differing status, viz. to label the respective parts
along design, manufacturing and delivery stages.
The formulation of Non- concepts and sockets in
this work and the examples given lead us to a unique
position about whether identity is/isn’t composition.
We say that identity and composition are
entangled. To a certain extent, composition changes
by parts’ removal/addition do not affect identity.
Beyond further removal/addition of parts,
identity breaks down. This is not marked by a fixed
quantitative limit; it depends on the part types and
order of removal/addition.
5.1 Future Work
Among the open questions regarding Non- concepts:
Do we need additional accessories to
characterize non- concepts? While it is satisfactory
that with a minimal set of generic classes – Sockets
and iSockets – one still needs a more comprehensive
investigation to provide a more definitive answer.
Are pluggable ontologies completely equivalent
to modular ontologies? Sockets seem to be the
natural mechanism to attach ontology modules.
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