Abstract
This paper shows how to use a top-level ontology to create robust and logically coherent domain ontology in a way that facilitates computational implementation and interoperability. It uses a domain ontology of ecosystem classification and delineation outlined informally Bailey’s paper on ‘Delineation of Ecoregions’ as a running example. Baily’s (from an ontological perspective) rather imprecise and ambiguous definitions are made more logically rigorous and precise by (a) restating the informal definitions formally using the top-level terms whose semantics was specified rigorously in a logic-based top-level ontology and (b) by enforcing the clear distinction of types of relations as specified at the top-level and specific relations of a given type as they occur in the ecosystem domain. In this way it becomes possible to formally distinguish a number of relations which logical interrelations are important but which have been confused and been taken to be a single relation before.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Guarino, N.: Formal ontology and information systems. In: Guarino, N. (ed.) Formal Ontology and Information Systems (FOIS 1998), pp. 3–15. IOS Press, Amsterdam (1998)
Bittner, T., Donnelly, M., Smith, B.: Individuals, universals, collections: On the foundational relations of ontology. In: Varzi, A., Vieu, L. (eds.) Proceedings of the third International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems, FOIS 2004, pp. 37–48. IOS Press, Amsterdam (2004)
Rector, R.: Modularization of domain ontologies implemented in description logics and related formalisms including OWL. In: Proceedings of the international conference on Knowledge capture, pp. 121–128 (2003)
Gangemi, A., Guarino, N., Masolo, C., Oltramari, A., Schneider, L.: Sweetening ontologies with DOLCE. AI Magazine 23(3), 13–24 (2003)
Copi, I.: Symbolic Logic. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ (1979)
Rector, A., Rogers, J.: Ontological issues in using a description logic to represent medical concepts: Experience from GALEN: Part 1 - principles. Methods of Information in Medicine (2002)
Spackman, K., Campbell, K., Cote, R.: SNOMED RT: A reference terminology for health care. In: Proceedings of the AMIA Annual Fall Symposium, pp. 640–644 (1997)
Sioutos, N., de Coronado, S., Haber, M.W., Hartel, F.W., Shaiu, W.L., Wright, L.W.: Nci thesaurus: a semantic model integrating cancer-related clinical and molecular information. J. Biomed. Inform. 40(1), 30–43 (2007)
The Gene Ontology Consortium: Creating the gene ontology resource: Design and implementation. Genome Res. 11, 1425–1433 (2001)
OBO: Open biomedical ontologies (2006), http://obofoundry.org
Smith, B., Ceusters, W., Klagges, B., Köhler, J., Kumar, A., Lomax, J., Mungall, C., Neuhaus, F., Rector, A., Rosse, C.: Relations in biomedical ontologies. Genome Biology 6(5), r46 (2005)
Abdelmoty, A.I., Smart, P.D., Jones, C.B., Fu, G., Finch, D.: A critical evaluation of ontology languages for geographic information retrieval on the internet. Journal of Visual Languages & Computing 16(4), 331–358 (2005)
Agarwal, P.: Ontological considerations in giscience. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 19(5), 501–536 (2005)
Grenon, P., Smith, B.: SNAP and SPAN: Towards dynamic spatial ontology. Spatial Cognition and Computation 4(1), 69–103 (2004)
Mark, D., Smith, B., Tversky, B.: Ontology and geographic objects: An empirical study of cognitive categorization. In: Freksa, C., Mark, D.M. (eds.) COSIT 1999. LNCS, vol. 1661, pp. 283–298. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
Feng, C.C., Bittner, T., Flewelling, D.: Modeling surface hydrology concepts with endurance and perdurance. In: Egenhofer, M.J., Freksa, C., Miller, H.J. (eds.) GIScience 2004. LNCS, vol. 3234, pp. 67–80. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Sorokine, A., Bittner, T.: Understanding taxonomies of ecosystems: a case study. In: Fisher, P. (ed.) Developments in Spatial Data Handling, pp. 559–572. Springer, Berlin (2005)
Sorokine, A., Bittner, T., Renscher, C.: Ontological investigation of ecosystem hierarchies and formal theory for multiscale ecosystem classifications. geoinformatica 10(3), 313–335 (2006)
Bailey, R.G.: Delineation of ecosystem regions. Environmental Management 7, 365–373 (1983)
Lowe, E.J.: Recent advances in metaphysics (keynote). In: Welty, C., Smith, B. (eds.) International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (2001)
Smith, B., Koehler, J., Kumar, A.: On the application or formal principles to life science data: a case study in the gene ontology. In: Rahm, E. (ed.) DILS 2004. LNCS (LNBI), vol. 2994, pp. 79–94. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Donnelly, M., Bittner, T., Rosse, C.: A formal theory for spatial representation and reasoning in bio-medical ontologies. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 36(1), 1–27 (2006)
Bittner, T., Donnelly, M.: Logical properties of foundational relations in bio-ontologies. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 39, 197–216 (2007)
Koeppen, W.: Grundriss der Klimakunde. W. de Gruyter, Berlin (1931)
Smith, B.: Fiat objects. Topoi 20(2), 131–148 (2001)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bittner, T. (2007). From Top-Level to Domain Ontologies: Ecosystem Classifications as a Case Study. In: Winter, S., Duckham, M., Kulik, L., Kuipers, B. (eds) Spatial Information Theory. COSIT 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4736. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74788-8_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74788-8_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-74786-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-74788-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)