Summary
Foundational ontologies are ontologies that have a large scope, can be highly reusable in different modeling scenarios, are philosophically and conceptually well founded, and are semantically transparent.
After the analysis and comparison of alternative theories on general notions like ‘having a property’, ‘being in time’ and ‘change through time’, this paper shows how specific elements of these theories can be coherently integrated into a foundational ontology. The ontology is here proposed as an improvement of the core elements of the ontology dolce and is thus called dolce-core.
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- 1.
- 2.
See, for instance, bfo: http://www.ifomis.org/bfo; gfo: http://www.onto-med.de/ontologies/gfo.html; opencyc: http://www.opencyc.org; sumo: http://www.ontologyportal.org/
- 3.
As usual in this area, we use the terms ‘class’ and ‘set’ interchangeably.
- 4.
There are other positions like, e.g., the bundle theory [23].
- 5.
We limit this presentation to properties. The arguments, mutatis mutandis, hold for relations as well.
- 6.
Recall the notion of property given in Sect. 2.1. One should refrain from considering boolean combinations of predicates, like ‘not being present’, as possible values for F.
- 7.
We use the set-theoretical∈predicate to indicate that here F stands for the class of tropes that satisfy F.
- 8.
We could do as in (a6) as well but we do not investigate this option here.
- 9.
Endurantists do not refuse the existence of temporal parts and temporal slices in general. They do not accept that all the persistent entities necessarily have temporal slices at each time of their existence.
- 10.
Analogously for temporary parthood even though, of course, this relation requires a notion of ‘existence in time’.
- 11.
All these statements are easily stated in logic. Here we omit their formal characterization.
- 12.
Perdurantists read CC(x, y, t) as the identity of the temporal slices x @ t and y @ t.
- 13.
This claim has to be taken with a grain of salt since one should not consider properties that constrain x before or after t itself, e.g., ‘being red an year after t’ (provided this actually counts as a property).
- 14.
Differently from [18], here we do not rely on logical definitions for concepts. The intensional aspect is (partially) characterized by explicitly stating when concepts are different.
- 15.
In the original version of dolce this relation is called quality and written qt.
- 16.
For those familiar with trope theory [5], qualities can be seen as sums of tropes. Indeed, one can interpret trope substitution as a change of quality location. The position adopted in dolce-core is compatible with trope theory without committing to the view that change corresponds to trope substitution.
- 17.
In dolce this relation is called quale and written ql. In dolce there is also a distinction between the immediate quale (a non temporary relation) and the temporary quale. dolce-core uses one temporary relation only since the temporal qualities of an event e at t correspond to the temporal qualities of the maximal part of e that spans t.
- 18.
Analogously, the ontology comprises the quality kind ‘being space-located’ which is not presented here.
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Borgo, S., Masolo, C. (2009). Foundational Choices in DOLCE. In: Staab, S., Studer, R. (eds) Handbook on Ontologies. International Handbooks on Information Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92673-3_16
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