Multilevel Approaches to Concepts and Formal Ontologies

In several disciplines there is a divide between advocates of formal, “classical” or symbolic approaches to representation, which can be expressed using standard formal logic, and advocates of biologically inspired, fuzzy or category-based approaches to representation, which can be implemented using fuzzy logic, neural networks, evolutionary computing and similar techniques. This paper argues that these two approaches should not be viewed as two mutually exclusive approaches but instead as two complementary forms of representation which both serve a purpose and can be combined. This is especially important with respect to formal ontologies, which currently only use formal, classical representations but which should utilize both approaches.