Adimen-SUMO: Reengineering an Ontology for First-Order Reasoning

In this paper, we present Adimen-SUMO, an operational ontology to be used by first-order theorem provers in intelligent systems that require sophisticated reasoning capabilities (e.g. Natural Language Processing, Knowledge Engineering, Semantic Web infrastructure, etc.). Adimen-SUMO has been obtained by automatically translating around 88% of the original axioms of SUMO (Suggested Upper Merged Ontology). Our main interest is to present in a practical way the advantages of using first-order theorem provers during the design and development of first-order ontologies. First-order theorem provers are applied as inference engines for reengineering a large and complex ontology in order to allow for formal reasoning. In particular, our study focuses on providing first-order reasoning support to SUMO. During the process, we detect, explain and repair several important design flaws and problems of the SUMO axiomatization. As a by-product, we also provide general design decisions and good practices for creating operational first-order ontologies of any kind.