Verifying and Mapping the Mereotopology of Upper-Level Ontologies

Upper-level ontologies provide an account of the most basic, domain-independent, existing entities, such as time, space, objects, and processes. Ontology verification is the process by which a theory is checked to rule out unintended models, and possibly characterize missing intended ones. In this paper, we verify the core characterization of mereotopology of the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO), and the mereology of the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE), while relating their axiomatizations via ontology mapping. As a result, we propose the correction and addition of some axioms to the analyzed theories which eliminate unintended models and characterize missing ones. In addition, we show by formal means which is the relation existing between the axiomatization of mereology in both upper-level ontologies, and make available a modular representation in first-order logic of the SUMO characterization of mereotopology.

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