Locating Things in Space and Time: Verification of the SUMO Upper-Level Ontology

Upper-level ontologies provide an account of the most basic, domain independent entities, such as time, space, objects and processes. They are intended to be broadly reused, among others, during ontology engineering tasks, such as ontology building and integration. Ontology verification is the process by which a theory is checked to rule out its unintended models, and possibly characterize missing intended ones. In this paper, we translate into first-order logic, modularize, and verify the subtheory of location of entities in space and time of the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology SUMO. As a result, we propose the addition of some axioms that rule out unintended models in SUMO, the correction of others, and make available a modularized version of SUMO characterization of location of entities in time and space represented in standard first-order logic.