How Group Lives Go Well

This paper explores the ontological space of group well being, proposing a framework for representing collective welfare, group functions, and long term contributions within an ontology engineering context. Traditional well being theories focus on individual states, often relying on hedonistic, desire satisfaction, or objective list models. Such approaches struggle to account for cases where individual sacrifices contribute to broader social progress, a critical challenge in modeling group flourishing. To address this, the paper refines and extends the Counterfactual Account (CT) of well being, which evaluates goodness of an event by comparing an individual's actual well being with a hypothetical counterpart in a nearby possible world. While useful, this framework is insufficient for group level ontologies, where well being depends on functional persistence, institutional roles, and historical impact rather than immediate individual outcomes. Drawing on Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), the paper introduces a model in which group flourishing is evaluated in terms of group functional, where members bear roles and exhibit persistence conditions akin to biological systems or designed artifacts. This approach enables semantic interoperability for modeling longitudinal social contributions, allowing for structured reasoning about group welfare, social institutions, and group flourishing over time.

Foundations for Digital Twins

The growing reliance on digital twins across various industries and domains brings with it semantic interoperability challenges. Ontologies are a well-known strategy for addressing such challenges, though given the complexity of the phenomenon, there are risks of reintroducing the interoperability challenges at the level of ontology representations. In the interest of avoiding such pitfalls, we introduce and defend characterizations of digital twins within the context of the Common Core Ontologies, an extension of the widely-used Basic Formal Ontology. We provide a set of definitions and design patterns relevant to the domain of digital twins, highlighted by illustrative use cases of digital twins and their physical counterparts. In doing so, we provide a foundation on which to build more sophisticated ontological content related and connected to digital twins.