Mental Process

• CURIE: gmeow:MentalProcess
• IRI: https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/MentalProcess
• Category: class
• Defined by: gmeow:slices/mentation
• Box roles: TBox role (What is this?)

A mental occurrence that unfolds in time — the perdurant (occurrent) counterpart of the endurant gmeow:MentalMoment: a perceiving, a reasoning, an imagining, a remembering, a dreaming. The kernel-level umbrella under which every mental event lives, so an agent's mental life can be queried as a single occurrent stream. A gmeow:Event borne by exactly one agent (gmeow:experiencer); the kind of process is a gmeow:mentalProcessType value, never a subclass (Principle 9). gmeow:InferenceProcess (inference slice) and gmeow:LearningEvent (learning slice) reparent under it from their own slices.

Structure

Subclass of: gmeow:Event

Practical Pattern

Use gmeow:MentalProcess as a specialized kind of gmeow:Event. Add statement metadata or a standpoint when the assertion needs provenance, confidence, or vantage.

Example Snippets

These snippets are generated from canonical slice examples and trimmed to the Turtle blocks where this term appears.

Mental Timeline

• Source: slices/core/mentation/examples/mental-timeline.ttl
• Examples catalog: open in catalog#example-slices-core-mentation-examples-mental-timeline

@prefix gmeow: <https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/> .
@prefix ex:    <https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/examples/mentation/> .
@prefix rdfs:  <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix xsd:   <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .



# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2026 Blackcat Informatics® Inc. <paudley@blackcatinformatics.ca>
# SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0
#
# Worked example — a small mental timeline for one agent.
#
# Three mental occurrents illustrate the mentation slice's core idioms:
#   1. A gmeow:MentalProcess of type processPerception — Ada notices morning light.
#      Carries a temporal frame the same way gmeow:Event takes one (events idiom,
#      gmeow:eventTime + gmeow:eventTemporalFrame), and MANIFESTS a perceptual
#      capacity via gmeow:realizesMentalMoment (ontological participation bridge).
#   2. A gmeow:MentalProcess of type processReasoning — Ada works through a proof.
#      gmeow:producesMentalMoment points at ex:beliefQEDholds — the reasoning CREATES
#      a new belief that did not exist beforehand (a gmeow:MentalMoment).
#   3. A gmeow:Experience (the phenomenal subset of MentalProcess) of type
#      processDreaming — Ada's dream last night. gmeow:Experience is used because
#      there is something it is like to undergo a dream (the qualia-bearing subset).
#
# All three are borne by exactly one experiencer (gmeow:experiencer is functional);
# gmeow:mentalProcessType is non-functional, so a process can carry multiple types.

ex:morningPerception a gmeow:MentalProcess ;
    rdfs:label "Ada's morning perception of daylight"@en ;
    gmeow:experiencer ex:ada ;                            # functional: one process, one experiencer
    gmeow:mentalProcessType gmeow:processPerception ;     # value-vocab slot, not a subclass
    gmeow:eventTime "2026-06-15T07:12:00Z"^^xsd:dateTime ; # temporal frame — same idiom as events/wedding.ttl
    gmeow:eventTemporalFrame gmeow:temporalFrameUTCGregorian ;
    gmeow:realizesMentalMoment ex:perceivedMorningLight .  # ontological participation: manifests the perceptual capacity

Common Companion Terms

gmeow:Event

External Equivalences

Equivalent or closely aligned targets: bfo

Linkages

Generated from the canonical mapping DSL. SSSOM files are the generated public interchange form for term equivalences.

Term Equivalences

Usage Advice

Use when

• Use as the umbrella for any mental OCCURRENCE that unfolds in time — a perceiving, reasoning, imagining, recollecting, or dreaming episode — so an agent's mental timeline is queryable as a single occurrent stream; the kind is a gmeow:mentalProcessType value.

Avoid when

• Avoid it for an enduring mental STATE (knowing, believing, desiring — those are endurant gmeow:MentalMoment modes, not occurrents) and avoid subclassing it to record a kind of process; the kind is a gmeow:mentalProcessType value, never a subclass (Principle 9). Only gmeow:Experience and own-slice reparents (gmeow:InferenceProcess, gmeow:LearningEvent) subclass it.

How to use

• Type the episode gmeow:MentalProcess, bind its bearer with gmeow:experiencer (functional), tag its kind(s) with gmeow:mentalProcessType, and link the endurant moment it settles via gmeow:realizesMentalMoment (manifest), gmeow:producesMentalMoment (create), or gmeow:updatesMentalTenure (transition); subclass it only from an owning slice (the inference / learning reparent hooks).

Examples

• ex:morningReasoning a gmeow:MentalProcess; gmeow:experiencer ex:lillith; gmeow:mentalProcessType gmeow:processReasoning.

Use For Consumers

• gmeow:consumerAgentMemory
• gmeow:consumerInternalArchive
• gmeow:consumerResearchQueue

Avoid For Consumers

• gmeow:consumerFoafExport
• gmeow:consumerSchemaOrgJsonLd