How Information Complies With a Template: A Dual Mereological System

Abstract

We propose an axiomatic ontological framework for both informational templates and the substantial informational entities (named “fillers”) that can comply with such templates. The mereological structure of a filler is provided by its slots, following seminal work by Bennett and the mereology of slots approach by Tarbouriech et al. Templates are composed of placeholders satisfying an extensional mereology. The parthood relation between placeholders is mirrored into the parthood between slots of the fillers compliant with those placeholders, where if a filler x complies with a placeholder a, the relation of mirroring is an isomorphism between a subset of slots of x and the template-parts of a. Some placeholders are mandatory and are mirrored into slots that need to be filled by a non-empty filler, whereas others are optional and are mirrored into slots that can be filled by an empty filler. We discuss mereological sum among placeholders and slots, order considerations, the distinction between empty fillers and empty concretizations (such as spaces or silences), the notion of semantic compliance and applications to clinical documents, relational databases and linguistics.