Ternary Entities

ABSTRACT: This short paper considers the posibility of defining entities on an ontology
using three aspects of them, called Names, Types and Values with their corresponding
class / instance mappings from the field of OO modeling.

Let's begin thinking that there should be three comprising parts defining entities in our
ontology. And for this parts, let's have the standard class / instance correlation but,
using the same elements, mapped as follows, like classes / instances. So there should be
that the:

Class of a Value = Type
Class of a Type = Name
Class of a Name = Value

Instance of a Name = Type
Instance of a Type = Value
Instance of a Value = Name

And, like the following drawing would represent, these parts assemble each other conforming,
recursively, the rest of the other parts:



A Value reifies a Name and a Type. A Name reifies a Type and a Value. a Type reifies a Value and a Name.
And a Value has a Name and a Type, a Name has a Type and a Value, a Type has a Value and a Type, whose

instances could be others than the reifiers, or the same, with a 'this' reference.
For example. Considering the concept of a Person's age, whose type is of integer type. The Value '26', of Name 'age', of type 'Person.age' (as a class), reifies the individual Persons whose age is of 26 years. And, considering a inheritance hiearchy where Value is the base class, Type is the subclass of Value and Name is the subclass of Type, then the (as an instance) Value of and individual Person (Type as an instance) of such Name, reifies all of the atributes and properties of the Person's Type (as a class).

Recursively applying the pattern where a Value reifies Names, Types, who, in turn, reifies other Types, Values and Names, should bring, defining separately, Classes and Instances, which are special cases of clases, where an Instance class can be another class class, or meta-class, or another class be the instance of a class, up-down and bottom-up capabilities to model complex structures with enough simple interfaces.