Abstract
Current ontologies’ upper-level taxonomic structure is often quite complicated and hard to understand. In this paper I show how the theoretical tools of so-called Formal Ontology, and especially the theory of identity, can help to formulate cleaner, more general, more rigorous, and more understandable upper-level ontologies. I focus in particular on some examples of multiple generalization, proposing a way of simplifying the domain structure by splitting some concepts according to different identity conditions, or by excluding them because of their limited organizational role.
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Guarino, N. (1999). The Role of Identity Conditions in Ontology Design. In: Freksa, C., Mark, D.M. (eds) Spatial Information Theory. Cognitive and Computational Foundations of Geographic Information Science. COSIT 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1661. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48384-5_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48384-5_15
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