Combination of Topology and Nonmonotonic Logics for Typicality in a Scientific Field: Paleoanthropology

In computer science, ontology is a model of a domain in the form of classes and of relationships between these classes. Classes are organized in a graph the arrows of which are semantic relations. Ontology is static because the class hierarchy is fixed. In paleontology, systematic (i.e., the class hierarchies and the class relationships) is complicated by the time variable. Morphological changes over time yield, by natural selection, the emergence of new forms (taxa) differing from the ancestral morph and contemporaneous taxa of the same class hierarchy. Discovering new taxa implies, therefore, the rearrangement of the class hierarchy or the definition of new classes, based on the degree of atypicality of the new morph. Note that this phenomenon occurs in many domains such as physics, biology, linguistics, for example.