ABSTRACT
The tough challenge of predicting emergence in system of systems is the striking difference between phenomenologically-inspired observations and their related conclusions and a comprehensive ontology. This research builds on the perceptions, observations, and interpretations of emergence as developed by many noteworthy authors over the past 140 years and extends the formal mereology of Stanislaw Leśniewski to allow construction of an ontologically-driven interpretive integrative framework by which to explain what emergence is and why it exists. The interpretive integrative framework captures emergence and explains its causal mechanisms because all objects and processes associated with a system or system of systems are bounded and explicitly made visible through the integration ontology and the causation ontology.
