Formal Ontology applied to Philosphy of Science: the Species Problem

In recent years, applications of formal ontology have formed a research front at the intersection of biological, biomedical research and information science/technology. It’s possible applications to and import for more traditional theoretical problems in biology, however, have been rarely addressed. The goal of the present paper is to utilize the toolkit of formal ontology in the analysis of one of the most controversial issues of supraindividual biology and biophilosophy, víz. the Species Problem. Reconstructing the relevant features of the state-of-the-art discourse within an ontological framework may heavily contribute to the clarification of the nature of this debate.