An Introduction to formal ontology and how it can facilitate semantic interoperability

Thomas Bittner
bittner3@buffalo.edu
Department of Philosophy and Department of Geography
State University of New York at Buffalo

Course outline

This course gives an introduction to formal ontology and how it can be used to facilitate semantic interoperability of (Geographic) Information Systems. The course has three major parts:

The first part motivates the need for ontologies and discusses the application of ontologies in information systems in general. The motivation mainly comes from analyzing bio-ontologies but the presented examples can be easily generalized to other domains such as geographic information processing. We discuss ontologies from a computer science perspective as a specification of a conceptualization [Gru93, Gua98]. In this discussion we will identify the need for formal ontology and for the development of top-level ontologies.

Top-level ontologies provide a formal account of notions that are fundamental in any domain. Examples include: the categories of universals and particulars (i.e., types and tokens); categories like endurants and perdurants (which reflect different modes of existence in time); formal relations such as parthood, connectedness, location, constitution, etc. The second part of the course gives an informal overview of axiomatic theories that were developed to formally characterize those notions (formal ontological theories, i.e., formal ontologies). We will mainly discuss theories presented in [Var03, Var96, Don03, BDS04, DB05, NGS04].

We will argue that well designed domain ontologies (geographic ontologies, bio-medical ontologies, etc.) use top-level ontologies as their foundations. This means that the semantics of the domain vocabulary is specified using top-level terms with an already well established semantics. Thus top-level ontologies facilitate the exchange of data and interoperability across different domains (e.g., geography, medicine, epidemiology, etc.) since they ensure that foundational terms are used in a unified and semantically compatible manner.

The third part starts with an overview of one specific top-level ontology, Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), and discusses how this ontology can be applied to geographic phenomena [GS04]. It will also briefly discuss DOLCE [MBG04] as an alternative top-level ontology.

Top-level ontologies are usually developed within a framework of first order logic [Smi03]. Due to the expressive power of first order logic these ontologies cannot be directly implemented on a computer. We will discuss, however, how top-level ontologies can be used to facilitate the implementation of domain-specific ontologies within less-expressive but computationally tractable description logics [BCM02].

References

BCM02

F. Baader, D. Calvanese, D.L. McGuinness, D. Nardi, and P.F. Patel-Schneider, editors. The Description Logic Handbook. Cambridge University Press, 2002.

BDS04

T. Bittner, M. Donnelly, and B. Smith. Individuals, universals, collections: On the foundational relations of ontology. In A.C. Varzi and L. Vieu, editors, Proceedings of the third International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems, FOIS04, volume 114 of Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, pages 37-48. IOS Press, 2004.

DB05

M. Donnelly and T. Bittner. Spatial relations between classes of individuals. In D. Mark and T. Cohn, editors, Spatial Information Theory. Cognitive and Computational Foundations of Geographic Information Science. International Conference (COSIT 2005), 2005.

Don03

M. Donnelly. Layered mereotopology. In IJCAI 2003 - Eighteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2003.

Gru93

T. Gruber. A translation approach to portable ontology specification. Knowledge Acquisition, pages 199-220, 1993.

GS04

P. Grenon and B. Smith. SNAP and SPAN: Prolegomenon to geodynamic ontology. Spatial Cognition and Computation, 2004.

Gua98

N. Guarino. Formal ontology and information systems. In Nicola Guarino, editor, Formal Ontology and Information Systems, (FOIS'98). IOS Press, 1998.

MBG04

M. Masolo, S. Borgo, A. Gangemini, N. Guarino, A. Oltramari, and A. Oltramari. WonderWeb deliverable D18 - ontology library (final). Technical report, ISTC-CNR, 2004.

NGS04

F. Neuhaus, P. Grenon, and B. Smith. A formal theory of substances, qualities, and universals. In A.C. Varzi and L. Vieu, editors, Proceedings of the third International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems, FOIS04, volume 114 of Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, pages 49-59. IOS Press, 2004.

Smi03

B. Smith. Ontology: An introduction. In L. Floridi, editor, Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information, 2003, 155-166,, pages 155-166. Oxford: Blackwell,, 2003.

Var96

A. Varzi. Parts, wholes, and part-whole relations: The prospects of mereotopology. Data and Knowledge Engineering, 20(3):259-86, 1996.

Var03

A. Varzi. Mereology. In Edward N. Zalta, editor, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford: CSLI (internet publication), 2003.

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