Today, Complex African Society; African Traditional Medicine (ATM) is used in parallel to Conventional Medicine (CM). Various attempts have been made to bridge the gap between African Traditional Medicine and Conventional Medicine in order to harmonize treatment and to create equal form of therapeutic cooperation. Although there is some minimal form of collaboration, African Traditional Medicin...

This introduction to the second international conference on Formal Ontology and Information Systems presents a brief history of ontology as a discipline spanning the boundaries of philosophy and information science. We sketch some of the reasons for the growth of ontology in the information science field, and offer a preliminary stocktaking of how the term ‘ontology’ is currently used. We concl...

In this communication, we advocate the use of upper level ontologies such as the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) to enhance terminological resources and research. First, we present common issues in ontologized terminological work. Then, we review two projects that illustrate the potential advantages of integrating rigorous formal upper level ontologies. Finally, we discuss possible challenges and c...

In both applied ontology and engineering, functionality is a well-researched topic, since it through teleological causal reasoning that domain experts build mental models of engineering systems, giving birth to functions. These are important throughout the whole lifecycle any product, being used from design phase up diagnosis activities. Though vast amount work model functions has already been ...

The term ‘ontology’ has recently acquired a certain currency within the knowledge engineering community, especially in relation to the ARPA knowledge-sharing initiative (see Gruber (to appear), Mars (ed.) 1994, Guarino 1994, Guarino, Carrara and Giaretta 1994, 1994a). The term is used in a number of different senses, however, not all of them clear or mutually compatible. Here I follow philosoph...

The term ontology is originated from Philosophy and was adopted by AI researchers to describe formal domain knowledge. Several ontology definitions have been proposed in the last decades. The most frequently cited definition is that given by Gruber in 1993, that is, ontology is defined as “an explicit specification of a conceptualization”. In other words, an ontology is a domain model (conceptu...