Towards principled core ontologies

An important issue in the newborn discipline of ontological engineering is the construction of libraries of ontologies which are designed for maximum reusability. Van Heijst et. al. suggested that a central part of ontology libraries is the deenition of what they called a core ontology, containing elements that are as generic and method-independent as possible. However, their speciication of how these core ontologies should be constructed is highly pragmatical, and leaves many problems unresolved. In this article we propose and discuss a number of speciic principles for the construction of core ontologies. We demonstrate the advantages of these principles using as an example a core ontology we have built for the domain of law. Several conclusions about the construction of ontology libraries based on core ontologies are drawn.

[1]  Peter F. Patel-Schneider,et al.  The DARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort: A Progress Report , 1997, KR.

[2]  Timothy W. Finin,et al.  Enabling Technology for Knowledge Sharing , 1991, AI Mag..

[3]  André Valente,et al.  ON-LINE: an architecture for modelling legal information , 1995, ICAIL '95.

[4]  Hans Kelsen,et al.  General Theory of Norms , 1991 .

[5]  Bob J. Wielinga,et al.  KADS: a modelling approach to knowledge engineering , 1992 .

[6]  Douglas R. Hofstadter,et al.  Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies , 1995 .

[7]  Yolanda Gil,et al.  INSPECT: an Intelligent System for Air Campaign Plan Evaluation based on EXPECT , 1996 .

[8]  G. Williams.  Causation in the Law , 1961, The Cambridge Law Journal.

[9]  Thomas R. Gruber,et al.  Toward principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing? , 1995, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[10]  J.A.P.J. Breuker,et al.  A suite of problem types , 1994 .

[11]  Bob J. Wielinga,et al.  Using explicit ontologies in KBS development , 1997, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[12]  Ramanathan V. Guha,et al.  Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems: Representation and Inference in the Cyc Project , 1990 .

[13]  G.A.C.M. van Heijst,et al.  The Role of Ontologies in Knowledge Engineering , 1995 .

[14]  Kevin Knight,et al.  Building a Large-Scale Knowledge Base for Machine Translation , 1994, AAAI.

[15]  Jerry R. Hobbs.  Sketch of an ontology underlying the way we talk about the world , 1995, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[16]  Nicola Guarino,et al.  Formal ontology, conceptual analysis and knowledge representation , 1995, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..