The Role of Identity Conditions in Ontology Design

Authors:
Nicola Guarino
Affiliations:
-
Venue:
COSIT '99 Proceedings of the International Conference on Spatial Information Theory: Cognitive and Computational Foundations of Geographic Information Science
Year:
1999

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Abstract

Current ontologies' upper-level taxonomic structure is often quite complicated and hard to understand. In this paper I show how the theoretical tools of so-called Formal Ontology, and especially the theory of identity, can help to formulate cleaner, more general, more rigorous, and more understandable upper-level ontologies. I focus in particular on some examples of multiple generalization, proposing a way of simplifying the domain structure by splitting some concepts according to different identity conditions, or by excluding them because of their limited organizational role.