An Ontology of Representation

Representations are largely used in scientific domains and in everyday life alike. When discussed as such, representations are evaluated primarily for the information (correct or incorrect, precise or imprecise, detailed or general) that they provide. In philosophy, information is mainly discussed along with the notion of aboutness, and in application-oriented communities with notions such as data and knowledge. From the ontological viewpoint, this adds to representation shortcomings from both viewpoints. We argue that the theory of representation is articulated, and that it is possible to address some aspects, such as the form–content relationship, without taking position on others, such as the aboutness relationship. In this paper, a representation is a complex ontological entity formed by a representation form and a representation content bound by an encoding relationship. This ontological model of representation leads to correctly answer questions like: “Ontologically speaking, what is a novel?” (and similarly for a painting, a piece of music, etc.) The broadness and flexibility of the proposed model are tested by discussing a list of different cases: from music to procedures, from novels to paintings, and maps. The status of letters (characters) in natural language expressions, which turns out to be quite complex, is also briefly investigated.