At this happy time of the year you should give some thought to the “less fortunate,” such as the Standard Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO).
Elementary school physics teaches four (4) states of matter: solid, liquid, gas, plasma, which SUMO enshrines as:
(subclass PhysicalState InternalAttribute)
(contraryAttribute Solid Liquid Gas Plasma)
(exhaustiveAttribute PhysicalState Solid Fluid Liquid Gas Plasma)
(documentation PhysicalState EnglishLanguage "The physical state of an &%Object. There
are three reified instances of this &%Class: &%Solid, &%Liquid, and &%Gas.
Physical changes are not characterized by the transformation of one
substance into another, but rather by the change of the form (physical
states) of a given substance. For example, melting an iron nail yields a
substance still called iron.")
...
Best thing is just to say it, there are over 500 phases of matter. A new method for classifying the states of matter offers insight into the design of superconductors and quantum computers.
SUMO is still “valid” in the sense Newtonian physics are still “valid,” provided your instruments or requirements are crude enough.
Use of these new states in research and engineering are underway, making indexing and retrieval active concerns.
Should we could ask researchers to withhold publications until SUMO and other ontology based systems have time to catch up?
Other alternatives?
I first saw this in: The 500 Phases of Matter: New System Successfully Classifies Symmetry-Protected Phases (Science Daily).
See also:
X. Chen, Z.-C. Gu, Z.-X. Liu, X.-G. Wen. Symmetry-Protected Topological Orders in Interacting Bosonic Systems. Science, 2012; 338 (6114): 1604 DOI: 10.1126/science.1227224
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