21 Facts About Upper ontology

In information science, an upper ontology is an ontology which consists of very general terms that are common across all domains.

An important function of an upper ontology is to support broad semantic interoperability among a large number of domain-specific ontologies by providing a common starting point for the formulation of definitions.

Any standard foundational Upper ontology is likely to be contested among different groups, each with its own idea of "what exists".

Objections to the feasibility of a common upper ontology do not take into account the possibility of forging agreement on an ontology that contains all of the primitive ontology elements that can be combined to create any number of more specialized concept representations.

An upper ontology based on such a set of primitive elements can include alternative views, provided that they are logically compatible.

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Users that develop new domain ontologies and find that there are semantic primitives needed for their domain but missing from the existing common upper ontology can add those new primitives by the accepted procedure, expanding the common upper ontology as necessary.

Such an ontology has thus far not been constructed because it would require a large project to develop so as to include all of the alternative views in the separately developed upper ontologies, along with their translations.

The main barrier to construction of such an Upper ontology is not the technical issues, but the reluctance of funding agencies to provide the funds for a large enough consortium of developers and users.

Several common arguments against upper ontology can be examined more clearly by separating issues of concept definition, language, and facts.

Formal ontologies typically use linguistic labels to refer to concepts, but the terms that label Upper ontology elements mean no more and no less than what their axioms say they mean.

That ontology would be one form of upper ontology, serving as a logical "interlingua" that can translate ideas in one terminology to its logical equivalent in another terminology.

Advocates argue that most disagreement about the viability of an upper ontology can be traced to the conflation of ontology, language and knowledge, or too-specialized areas of knowledge: many people, or agents or groups will have areas of their respective internal ontologies that do not overlap.

Each occurrent Upper ontology can be conceived as an inventory of processes unfolding through a given interval of time.

The more than 350 Upper ontology frameworks based on BFO are catalogued on the BFO website.

Business Objects Reference Ontology is an upper ontology designed for developing ontological or semantic models for large complex operational applications that consists of a top ontology as well as a process for constructing the ontology.

COSMO is an Upper ontology that was initiated as a project of the COSMO working group of the Ontology and taxonomy Coordinating Working Group, with the goal of developing a foundation Upper ontology that can serve to enable broad general Semantic Interoperability.

Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering is a foundational Upper ontology designed in 2002 in the context of the WonderWeb EU project, developed by Nicola Guarino and his associates at the Laboratory for Applied Ontology.

General formal Upper ontology, developed by Heinrich Herre and his colleagues of the research group Onto-Med in Leipzig, is a realistic Upper ontology integrating processes and objects.

Upper ontology developed by the IDEAS Group is higher-order, extensional and 4D.

The IDEAS Upper ontology is not intended for reasoning and inference purposes; its purpose is to be a precise model of business.

ROMULUS is a foundational Upper ontology repository aimed at improving semantic interoperability.