An ontology is an explicit formal conceptualization of some domain of interest. Ontology evaluation is the problem of assessing a given ontology from the point of view of a particular criterion or application, typically in order to determine which of several ontologies would best suit a particular purpose. This paper proposes an ontology evaluation approach based on comparing an ontology to a g...

The Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) was developed over the last two decades by consistently putting together theories from areas such as formal ontology in philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophical logics. It comprises a number of micro-theories addressing fundamental conceptual modeling notions, including entity types relationship types. aim this paper is to summarize c...

Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is a top-level ontology consisting of thirty-six classes, designed to support information integration, retrieval, and analysis across all domains scientific investigation, presently employed in over 350 projects around the world. BFO genuine ontology, containing no terms particular material domains, such as physics, medicine, or psychology. In this paper, we demonstr...

Analyzing the notion of role in the literature yields a plurality of views and definitions. In [1–3], we study a broad range of approaches in order to interrelate and harmonize them (where possible) in the context of an ontological framework, whose central component is the top-level ontology General Formal Ontology (GFO) [4]. A major goal of our work is the provision of a role definition which ...

Ontologies have emerged as one of the key issues in information integration and interoperability and their application to knowledge management and electronic commerce. A trend towards formal methods for ontology management is obvious. This paper discusses a concept which can be expected to be of great importance to formal ontology management, and which is well-known in traditional software deve...

There are many different kinds of ontologies used for different purposes in modern computing. Lightweight ontologies are easy to create, but difficult to deploy; formal ontolgies are relatively easy to deploy, but difficult to create. This paper presents an approach that combines the strengths and avoids the weaknesses of lightweight and formal ontologies. In this approach, the ontology include...

The Gene Ontology Next Generation Project (GONG) is developing a staged methodology to evolve the current representation of the Gene Ontology into DAML+OIL in order to take advantage of the richer formal expressiveness and the reasoning capabilities of the underlying description logic. Each stage provides a step level increase in formal explicit semantic content with a view to supporting valida...

As a medical domain knowledge base, the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) focuses on formal and professional medical terms; online health forums contain user-generated “folk terms”, which can be used to complement the UMLS vocabulary. In this paper, we propose an approach to detecting folk terms from online discussions and matching their meanings to UMLS concepts. This approach makes conne...

There are many different kinds of ontologies used for different purposes in modern computing. A continuum exists from lightweight ontologies to formal ontologies. In this paper we compare and contrast the lightweight ontology and the formal ontology approaches to data interoperability. Both approaches have strengths and weaknesses, but they both lack scalability because of the n problem. We pre...

Time, events, changes, and processes play a major role in medical conceptual modeling. Representation of time-structures and reasoning about time-oriented medical data are important theoretical and practical research areas. We assume that a formal representation of temporal knowledge must use as a framework some top-level ontology which describes the most general categories of temporal entities...