Upper Ontology: Fundamentals and Applications

By Fouad Sabry

What Is Upper Ontology

In the field of information science, an upper ontology is defined as an ontology that is made up of extremely general terms that are shared by all different types of domains. An important role of an upper ontology is to support broad semantic interoperability among a large number of domain-specific ontologies by offering a common beginning point for the formation of definitions. This is accomplished by giving a starting point that is shared by all of the ontologies in question. The terms in the domain ontology are ranked lower than the terms in the upper ontology; for instance, the classes in the upper ontology are either superclasses or supersets of all of the classes in the domain ontologies.

How You Will Benefit

(I) Insights, and validations about the following topics:

Chapter 1: Upper ontology

Chapter 2: Ontology (computer science)

Chapter 3: Knowledge representation and reasoning

Chapter 4: Ontology language

Chapter 5: Ontology engineering

Chapter 6: Semantic interoperability

Chapter 7: Ontology-based data integration

Chapter 8: Formal ontology

Chapter 9: General formal ontology

Chapter 10: Information model

(II) Answering the public top questions about upper ontology.

(III) Real world examples for the usage of upper ontology in many fields.

(IV) 17 appendices to explain, briefly, 266 emerging technologies in each industry to have 360-degree full understanding of upper ontology' technologies.

Who This Book Is For

Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of upper ontology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Billion Knowledgeable
• Release date: Jun 29, 2023

Book preview

Chapter 1: Upper ontology

An upper ontology (or top-level ontology, upper model, or foundation ontology) is a kind of ontology (in the sense used in information science) that includes just the most universally applicable concepts (such as object, property, and relation), such as those described above. For several different domain-specific ontologies to be able to work together, an upper ontology must serve as a common ground for the development of definitions. The upper ontology is a hierarchy in which all of the classes in the domain ontology are subclasses of the classes in the higher ontology.

There have been several suggested higher ontologies, each with its own advocates.

The first known examples of ontologies are library categorization systems. Library classifications are useful for organizing and categorizing information because they use universal ideas that apply to all fields of study.

Different communities, each with its unique conception of what is, will undoubtedly disagree on any universal, underlying ontology. The dearth of open-source software that would allow testing of diverse ontologies in the same computational environment has been a contributing reason to the inability to arrive at a single methodology. Thus, the disagreements have been discussed mostly on theoretical grounds or are simply the product of different tastes. However, adoption rates may be compared amongst foundational ontologies to facilitate interoperability between different types of ontologies.

So yet, no one higher ontology has achieved near-universal adoption as the default. Many groups have made attempts to establish industry-wide norms in many fields. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed a language called Process Specification Language (PSL).

The complexity of extant higher ontologies is a further issue in their lack of widespread acceptance. The learning process can be even longer than for a natural language due to the unfamiliar format and logical rules of some upper ontologies; Cyc is often used as an example of this. These ontologies can contain thousands of elements (classes, relations), have complex interactions among them, and are as complex as a human natural language. The lack of easily available examples of application significantly reduces the incentive to overcome this learning barrier. Therefore, those developing domain ontologies for local applications often develop the bare-bones, unrelated-to-any-upper-ontology version of the ontology feasible. While they may serve their local purpose well, relating them appropriately to other domain ontologies is a very time-consuming process.

Some really top-level ontologies have been established as a solution to this issue; they are made to have as little overlap as possible with domain ontologies on purpose. Some examples are the DOLCE and Basic Formal Ontology (see below).

Throughout history, numerous groups and communities have tried to establish one set of ideas as superior to another on the basis of authority, truth, or reason. The absence of a transcendent viewpoint (a God's eye view) among humans is sometimes cited as an argument against such endeavors. Because of linguistic and cultural limitations, humans cannot see the landscape of ideas objectively enough to determine a universal norm. Under the headline Thomasson, 1.5 Skepticism about Category Systems, wrote: category systems, at least as traditionally presented, seem to presuppose that there is a unique true answer to the question of what categories of entity there are; indeed, the discovery of this answer is the goal of most such inquiries into ontological categories. [...] A unique, accurate, and complete system of categories may be discovered, however real category systems given differ so greatly that even a brief study of prior category systems like the one above might invalidate this assumption. With so many different perspectives on what the ontological categories are, how can we possible select amongst them to arrive at a single, definitive answer?

The difficulty in coming up with adequate definitions is another common criticism. Ontologies at the highest level are built to provide the most interoperability support for the most terms. Therefore, such ontologies must include terms expressing extremely broad concepts; however, such concepts are so fundamental to our knowledge that they cannot be defined, since definition by its very nature implies that a less fundamental (and thus less well understood) concept is defined in terms of a fundamental (and thus, ideally, more well understood) concept. In many cases, it is only through the use of instances or paraphrasing that abstract ideas may be made clear.

No categorization of the world's ideas is obvious, much less uncontroversial.

There is no common ground that can be used as a bridge between different domain- or domain-specific ontologies.

As it is, human language is just a rough approximation of one such mental map. It is asking for difficulty to assume that a one-to-one correspondence exists between English words and the many intellectual ideas that we may want to express in our ontologies. (For example, WordNet is effective and valuable because it doesn't try to be a general-purpose higher ontology but rather is a tool for semantic, syntactic, and linguistic disambiguation that is deeply rooted in the English language's particulars and quirks.)

An ontological, epistemological, linguistic, cultural, and, finally, pragmatic vantage point is required for any hierarchical or topological representation of ideas. A pragmatic approach like this cannot ignore the political dynamics between individuals or groups; rather, it calls for these dynamics to be seen as no more advanced than the most rudimentary ones.

Those who doubt the feasibility of general purpose ontologies are more inclined to ask what specific purpose do we have in mind for this conceptual map of entities and what practical difference will this ontology make? This pragmatic philosophical position surrenders all hope of devising the encoded ontology version of The world is everything that is the case. (Wittgenstein, (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus).

Finally, there are concerns that are analogous to those raised about AI. Since we don't have axioms for such systems, the complexity of human idea acquisition and social/linguistic interactions imply that any axiomatic basis of most fundamental concepts must be cognitive biological or otherwise difficult to describe. From a moral perspective, it would not take long for any all-purpose ontology to become a genuine tyrant by enlisting followers in a political program to spread it and its financial methods and, in extreme cases, defend it by