ArticlePloS one2012
Fiat or bona fide boundary--a matter of granular perspective.
Article in PloS one, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Challenges of a GIS-based physical-geographical regionalization of Poland.Environmental monitoring and assessment · 2023Pooled it
- A new morphological phylogeny of Malacostraca comparing the application of character dependencies and implied weighting.Cladistics : the international journal of the Willi Hennig Society · 2025Article
- The use of foundational ontologies in biomedical research.Journal of biomedical semantics · 2023Review
- FAIR data representation in times of eScience: a comparison of instance-based and class-based semantic representations of empirical data using phenotype descriptions as example.Journal of biomedical semantics · 2021Article
- Levels and building blocks-toward a domain granularity framework for the life sciences.Journal of biomedical semantics · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundDistinguishing bona fide (i.e. natural) and fiat (i.e. artificial) physical boundaries plays a key role for distinguishing natural from artificial material entities and is thus relevant to any scientific formal foundational top-level ontology, as for instance the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). In BFO, the distinction is essential for demarcating two foundational categories of material entity: object and fiat object part. The commonly used basis for demarcating bona fide from fiat boundary refers to two criteria: (i) intrinsic qualities of the boundary bearers (i.e. spatial/physical discontinuity, qualitative heterogeneity) and (ii) mind-independent existence of the boundary. The resulting distinction of bona fide and fiat boundaries is considered to be categorial and exhaustive. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL
findingsBy Referring to various examples from biology, we demonstrate that the hitherto used distinction of boundaries is not categorial: (i) spatial/physical discontinuity is a matter of scale and the differentiation of bona fide and fiat boundaries is thus granularity-dependent, and (ii) this differentiation is not absolute, but comes in degrees. By reducing the demarcation criteria to mind-independence and by also considering dispositions and historical relations of the bearers of boundaries, instead of only considering their spatio-structural properties, we demonstrate with various examples that spatio-structurally fiat boundaries can nevertheless be mind-independent and in this sense bona fide. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: We argue that the ontological status of a given boundary is perspective-dependent and that the strictly spatio-structural demarcation criteria follow a static perspective that is ignorant of causality and the dynamics of reality. Based on a distinction of several ontologically independent perspectives, we suggest different types of boundaries and corresponding material entities, including boundaries based on function (locomotion, physiology, ecology, development, reproduction) and common history (development, heredity, evolution). We argue that for each perspective one can differentiate respective bona fide from fiat boundaries.
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