Ontologies as Theories

Abstract

This position paper argues that certain familiar ontology design problems are profitably addressed by treating ontologies as theories and by defining a set of operations that create new ontologies, including their constraints, out of other ontologies. The paper first illustrates how to use the operations in the context of ontology reuse. It goes further and shows how to take advantage of the operations to compare different ontologies, or different versions of an ontology, and to design mediated schemas in a bottom up fashion. The discussion in this position paper is backed up by a tool that implements the operations and that offers other facilities to manipulate ontologies.