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Overview
General Formal Ontology (GFO)
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16 Comparisons With Other Foundational Ontologies
Apart from GFO, a number of top-level ontologies are proposed by
different groups or persons, among them DOLCE36
(39,40), SUMO37(42), CYC38 (35), Matthew West's
4D-ontology39(62), John Sowa's ontology (54),
Johanna Seibt's process ontology (cf. (52))
and others. Moreover, the continuous coexistence of different top-level
approaches was acknowledged at the March 2006 Upper Ontology Summit, a meeting of
several representatives from some of these
groups.40Hence, the comparison and alignment of different top-level ontologies
remains an important task in general. Here, we compare GFO with two of
the above ontologies, namely DOLCE and that of John Sowa,
while further comparisons remain to be completed. The next ontologies to
be included are SUMO and the ontologies of M. West and J. Seibt.
The following comparison is based on textual specifications, and is
neither intended to be complete, nor to provide a formal mapping between
the ontologies. Tables 2 and 3
(p. ![[*]](crossref.png) and ) present
coarse mappings between GFO and DOLCE. Tables 4 and
5 (p. and ) offer
analogous mappings between GFO and Sowa's ontology. Two mappings are specified
for each ontology because only very few categories correspond
to one another exactly, but several categories may describe one
category in the other ontology. Parentheses in the right columns
indicate a lower level of adequacy for a particular mapping.
Subsections
Robert Hoehndorf
2006-10-18
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