Situations are entities that have been discussed in philosophy,
ontology and computer science for applications in the field of knowledge
representation,
conceptual modelling and natural language semantic. On the basis of an
extensive literature review, situations and entities we call situoids,
which are more basic than situations,
will be discussed and their ontological features investigated. As far
as possible, the results of this investigation are formulated as
axioms. This is
done with respect to a background top-level ontology, the ontology of
GOL. The belief that situoids are ``parts of reality that can be
comprehended as a whole'' is central to this research, and will be
investigated thoroughly. Situations as derived entities are not given
as much attention, but some of their features will be discussed as
well. While attempting to describe situoids, other categories have to
be mentioned, such as states of affairs and infons. The theory is
built up systematically from states of affairs over infons, situoids
to situations. Some applications known from situation theory are
revisited in the framework of situoids. Finally, it is shown how the
theory if situoids can be used to introduce modality in GOL.
My gratitude goes to my parents for giving birth to me and feeding me
when I was younger.
I would like to thank my advisor on this thesis, Prof. Heinrich Herre,
for his help, long discussions and for waking my interest in ontology
and knowledge representation techniques.
Special thanks go to my friend Kay Pruefer for his critics,
long discussions about this thesis and proof-reading my first draft of
this thesis.
I am also grateful to my friend Karen Walzer
for proof-reading
the final version of this thesis, correcting my bad English and for
joyful discussions.
Thanks also go to Matthias Adams for sharing enjoyful games of VGA
Planets with me. I am grateful to Tim Wisseman for creating the game
VGA Planets.
My gratitude goes to all scientists and researchers who published
their articles in Open Access Journals![[*]](/usr/share/latex2html/icons/footnote.png)
. As a student, I could not afford to buy
articles from established journals for tons of money. The Internet
provides the means for all scientist to publish their research for
everybody free of charge, and I believe, all scientist should do so.
