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Overview
General Formal Ontology (GFO)
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1.1 Formal Ontology and Information Systems
Formal Ontology is the science that is concerned with the
systematic development of axiomatic theories describing forms, modes, and
views of being at different levels of abstraction and
granularity. Formal ontology combines the methods of mathematical
logic with the analyses and principles of philosophy, but also with
the methods and principles of other sciences, in particular artificial
intelligence, cognitive psychology, and linguistics. Hence, the
term Formal
Ontology is used here in a sense different from that in philosophy;
it is intended to be a research area in computer science,
artificial intelligence, and conceptual modelling that is aimed at the
development of
axiomatically founded theories
that are represented by means of a formal language and describe
parts of the world.1
At the most general level of abstraction, formal ontology is concerned
with those categories
that apply to every
area
of the world. We call this level of description General
Ontology, Top Level Ontology, or Foundational Ontology, in contrast to the various
Generic, Domain Core or Domain
Ontologies, which are applicable to more
restricted fields of interest. In the following, we adopt the term
foundational ontology and assume that every domain-specific
or generic
ontology must use such an ontology as a framework and reference system.
Recently, formal ontology has been applied in various areas where the notion
of an ontology is used in a very broad sense. A particular
ontology is generally understood to be a description of a given domain that
can
be accepted and reused in all information systems referring to this
domain. Sometimes even terminologies are considered
as ontologies, but we take a more narrow position. Usually,
the backbone of an application ontology is a taxonomy
of concepts that is based on the subsumption link.
Robert Hoehndorf
2006-10-18
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