  In our daily lives, as in science and in all other domains, we encounter huge
numbers of dispositions (tendencies, potentials, powers) which are realized in
processes such as sneezing, sweating, shedding dandruff, and on and on. Among
this plethora of what we can think of as mere dispositions is a subset of
dispositions in whose realizations we have an interest a car responding well
when driven on ice, a rabbits lungs responding well when it is chased by a
wolf, and so on. We call the latter capabilities and we attempt to provide a
robust ontological account of what capabilities are that is of sufficient
generality to serve a variety of purposes, for example by providing a useful
extension to ontology-based research in areas where capabilities data are
currently being collected in siloed fashion.
