Foundational ontology is about categories of reality or thought which are common to all or almost all subject-matters. Commonly considered examples of such categories include ‘object’, ‘quality’, ‘function’, ‘role’, ‘process’, ‘event’, ‘time’, and ‘place’. There are several foundational ontologies that provide a systematic formal representation of these categories, their relationships, and interdependencies. Amongst existing foundational ontologies, there is both a substantial measure of agreement and some dramatic disagreements. There is currently no uniform consensus concerning how a foundational ontology should be organised, how far its ‘reach’ should be (e.g., is the distinction between physical and non-physical entities sufficiently fundamental to be included here?), and even what role it should play in relation to more specialised domain ontologies.

The main use of foundational ontologies is as a starting point for the development of domain ontologies and application ontologies. A foundational ontology provides an ontology engineer with a conceptual framework that enables her to analyse a given domain, identify the entities in the domain as specialisations of the generic categories in the foundational ontology, and often reuse relationships (e.g., parthood) from the foundational ontology. The utilisation of foundational ontologies for the development of domain and application ontologies has two main benefits.

Firstly, the ontology engineer can reuse an existing set of well-studied ontological distinctions and design principles instead of having to develop an ad-hoc solution. Secondly, if two domain ontologies are based on the same foundational ontology, it is easier to integrate them.

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2708/preface.pdf

Fri, Apr 23, 2021