Although there is consensus that a formal ontology consists of a set of axioms within some logical language, there is little consensus on how a formal ontology differs from an arbitrary theory. There is an intuitive distinction between the formal ontology and the set of domain theories that use the ontology, but there has been no characterization of this distinction in the context of first-orde...

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 lan...

Ontology is the explicit representation of domain concept model. It can well express the complicated relationships between objects. Since formal ontology is the foundation of domain knowledge sharing and reusing, the formal ontology and associated concepts are stated in this paper. Previously research on ontology construction is high-cost and time-consuming, a new method of building ontology us...

Formal ontology, as the science of the formal relations that structure reality as a whole, aims at a theory of categories corresponding to the most general features of possible objects, whether existing or non-existing. The present paper is an attempt to summarise and extend recent research in analytical metaphysics in a formalised theory of objects. Existence is characterised as a formal prope...