Abstract: This research is concerned with causal understanding of behavior of physical systems, which is an important topic of qualitative reasoning systems. In this article, a causal time ontology is proposed, aiming at explicit description of design and modeling rationales of reasoning systems with respect to time. The ontology defines a set of causal time units which are categories of time intervals for propagation of change. Some conventional reasoning systems are characterized by their causal time resolutions in terms of the time units, which show us their implicit assumptions together with limitations. Our reasoning system satisfying the necessary time resolution is presented. The constituents of the model for the time resolution is also discussed.

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