Formal Ontology - A New Discipline Between Philosophy, Formal Logic, and Artificial Intelligence

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, library and information science, qualitative modeling of physical systems, natural language processing, knowledge engineering, and databases. An ontology supplies a unifying framework for communication, it establishes a basis for knowledge organization and knowledge representation and contributes to theory formation and modeling of a specific domain. In the current paper we outline basic principles of formal ontology, being an evolving science which integrates aspects of philosophy, formal logic, and artificial intelligence. A central feature of formal ontology is the onto-axiomatic method which includes as a core component a top level ontology. We summarize the principles of the top level ontology GFO (General Formal Ontology) which is being developed at the university of Leipzig. The various sources of formal ontology are explicated and exemplified, and it is demonstrated that formal ontology is more than an eclectic aggregrate of the mentioned research areas.