Formal Ontology and Principles and Prospects of Knowledge Organisation: An Axiomatic Approach

Research in ontology has in recent years become widespread in the field of information systems, in various areas of sciences, in business, in economy, and in industry. The importance of ontologies is increasingly recognized in fields diverse as in e-commerce, semantic web, enterprise, information integration, information science, qualitative modeling of physical systems, natural language processing, knowledge engineering, and databases. Ontologies provide formal specifications and harmonized definitions of concepts used to represent knowledge of specific domains. An ontology supplies a unifying framework for communication, it establishes the basis for knowledge representation and contributes to theory formation about a specific domain. In the present paper we endeavor an outlook onto the future of knowledge organization in multilingual, cross-scale repository integration and navigation and as the central part of this paper present and discuss principles of representation and organization of knowledge that grew out of the use of formal ontology. The core of the discussed ontological framework is a top level ontology, called GFO (General Formal Ontology), which is being developed at the University of Leipzig. After discussing the meaning of the current information crisis, an ontological framework is presented and principles are discussed which could be used to contribute to a solution of this crisis. These principles make use of the ontoaxiomatic method, of graduated conceptualizations, of levels of reality, and of levels of information abstraction.