A note on the compatibility of part-whole relations with foundational ontologies

Parthood in mereology is one relation, and typically is included in foundational ontologies. Some of these foundational ontologies and many domain ontologies use a plethora of parthood and part-whole relations, such as `sub process' and `portion'. This poses requirements on the foundational ontologies and, perhaps, Ontology, on what to do with these two different approaches to part-whole relations. We present an analysis of DOLCE, BFO, GFO, SUMO, GIST, and YAMATO on their inclusion and use of part-whole relations. It demonstrates there is no perfect fit with either for various reasons. We then aim to bridge this gap with an orchestration of ontologies of part-whole relations that are aligned to several foundational ontologies and such that they can be imported into other ontologies

A Survey of Top-Level Ontologies - to inform the ontological choices for a Foundation Data Model

The Centre for Digital Built Britain has been tasked through the Digital Framework Task Group to develop an Information Management Framework (IMF) to support the development of a National Digital Twin (NDT) as set out in “The Pathway to an Information Management Framework” (Hetherington, 2020). A key component of the IMF is a Foundation Data Model (FDM), built upon a top-level ontology (TLO), as a basis for ensuring consistent data across the NDT. This document captures the results collected from a broad survey of top-level ontologies, conducted by the IMF technical team. It focuses on the core ontological choices made in their foundations and the pragmatic engineering consequences these have on how the ontologies can be applied and further scaled. This document will provide the basis for discussions on a suitable TLO for the FDM. It is also expected that these top-level ontologies will provide a resource whose components can be harvested and adapted for inclusion in the FDM

Ontologies on the semantic web

As an informational technology, the World Wide Web has enjoyed spectacular success. In just ten years it has transformed the way information is produced, stored, and shared in arenas as diverse as shopping, family photo albums, and high-level academic research. The “Semantic Web” was touted by its developers as equally revolutionary but has not yet achieved anything like the Web’s exponential uptake. This 17 000 word survey article explores why this might be so, from a perspective that bridges both philosophy and IT

Ontology-based similarity for product information retrieval

Product development of today is becoming increasingly knowledge intensive. Specifically, design teams face considerable challenges in making effective use of increasing amounts of information. In order to support product information retrieval and reuse, one approach is to use case-based reasoning (CBR) in which problems are solved ‘‘by using or adapting solutions to old problems.’’ In CBR, a case includes both a representation of the problem and a solution to that problem. Case-based reasoning uses similarity measures to identify cases which are more relevant to the problem to be solved. However, most nonnumeric similarity measures are based on syntactic grounds, which often fail to produce good matches when confronted with the meaning associated to the words they compare. To overcome this limitation, ontologies can be used to produce similarity measures that are based on semantics. This paper presents an ontology-based approach that can determine the similarity between two classes using feature-based similarity measures that replace features with attributes. The proposed approach is evaluated against other existing similarities. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is illustrated with a case study on product–service–system design problems

A Semantic Similarity Method for Products and Processes

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