Gol

Abstract

Every domain-specific ontology must use as a framework some upper-level ontology which describes the most general, domain-independent categories of reality. In the present paper we sketch a new type of upper-level ontology, which is intended to be the basis of a knowledge modelling language COL (for: 'General Ontological Language'). It turns out that the upperlevel ontology underlying standard modelling languages such as KIF, F-Logic and CycL is restricted to the ontology of sets. Set theory has considerable mathematical power and great flexibility as a framework for modelling different sorts of structures. At the same time it has the disadvantage that sets are abstract entities (entities existing outside the realm of time, space and causality), and thus a set-theoretical framework should be supplemented by some other machinery if it is to support applications in the ripe, messy world of concrete objects. In the present paper we partition the entities of the real world into sets and urelements, and then we introduce several new ontological relations between these urelements. In contrast to standard modelling and representation formalisms, the concepts of GOL provide a machinery for representing and analysing such ontologically basic relations.

On the Foundations of UML as an Ontology Representation Language

“…For a complete and detailed presentation of GOL and GFO, one should refer to [3,4]. For a comparison between GFO and other upper-level ontologies, such as the IEEE Standard Upper Ontology, KIF, Sowa, Russel and Norvig and LADSEB (that can be considered a preliminary version of DOLCE [10]), one should refer to [3].…”

“…For example it glues your smile to your face, or the charge in a specific conductor to the conductor itself. In our framework we adopt the so-called adopt non-migration principle [3]: it is not possible that an intrinsic moment m inheres in two different substances a and b. As a consequence, if we have two particular substances a (a red apple) and b (a red car), and two moments m 1 (particular redness of a) and m 2 (particular redness of b), we consider m 1 and m 2 to be different individuals, although perhaps qualitatively indistinguishable.…”

“…Examples of formal relations are: 5 is greater than 3, this day is part-of this month, and N is subset of Q but also the relations of instantiation (::), inherence (i), quale of a quality (ql), assoc, dependence, among others. In principle, the category of formal relations includes those relations that form the mathematical superstructure of our framework [1,3]. However, we also classify as formal those domain relations that exhibit similar characteristics, i.e.…”

“…Figure 1 depicts some of the basic elements of the foundational ontology, which will be referenced throughout this work. This ontology represents a version of the General Formal Ontology (GFO) underlying the language GOL as presented in [3,4]. The General Ontology Language (GOL) and GFO are under development as part of the OntoMed (Ontologies in Medicine) Research Group at the University of Leipzig.…”

“…There is a growing interest in the use of UML class diagrams as a modeling language to represent domain ontologies. In a series of papers [1,2] we have been using the General Ontological Language (GOL) and its underlying foundational ontology, proposed in [3,4], to evaluate the ontological correctness of a conceptual UML class model and to develop guidelines for how the constructs of the UML should be used in conceptual modeling and ontology representation. This paper can be seen as a continuation of this work, in which we focus on analyzing the UML metaconcepts of classes, attributes, data types and associations from an ontological point of view.…”