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A Meta-ontological Architecture for Foundational Ontologies

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On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2005: CoopIS, DOA, and ODBASE (OTM 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 3761))

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Abstract

In this paper we present and discuss a meta-ontological architecture for ontologies which centers on abstract core ontologies (ACOs). An ACO is the most abstract part of a foundational ontology. It is useful for an ontologically founded description of ontologies themselves, therefore ACOs are lifted to the meta-level. We propose a three-layered meta-ontological architecture which distinguishes an object level comprising foundational, generic or domain-specific ontologies, a meta-level with abstract core ontologies, and a meta-meta-level employing abstract top ontologies for the formalization of the underlying levels. Moreover, two axiomatic fragments for ACOs are provided, one of which is applied to formal concept lattices [1]. This demonstrates the use of ACOs for the ontological foundation of representation formalisms and illustrates advantages in comparison to the usual direct formal reduction to set theory. Finally, related work with respect to the architecture is briefly discussed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Group Ontologies in Medicine (Onto-Med), Institute of Medical Informatics, Statistics, and Epidemiology (IMISE) and, Institute of Informatics (IfI), Leipzig University, Germany

    Heinrich Herre & Frank Loebe

Authors
  1. Heinrich Herre
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  2. Frank Loebe
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. STARLab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Bldg G/10, Pleinlaan 2, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Robert Meersman

  2. School of Computer Science and Information Technology, RMIT University, Bld 10.10, 376-392 Swanston Street, VIC 3001, Melbourne, Australia

    Zahir Tari

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Herre, H., Loebe, F. (2005). A Meta-ontological Architecture for Foundational Ontologies. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z. (eds) On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2005: CoopIS, DOA, and ODBASE. OTM 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3761. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11575801_29

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11575801_29

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-29738-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32120-0

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