Semantic Integration in the Information Flow Framework

Abstract

The Information Flow Framework (IFF) is a descriptive category metatheory currently under development, which is being offered as the structural aspect of the Standard Upper Ontology (SUO). The architecture of the IFF is composed of metalevels, namespaces and meta-ontologies, whose core forms a metastack representing the set-theoretic notions of the "small", the "large", the "very large" and the "generic". The main application of the IFF is institutional: the notion of institutions and their morphisms are being axiomatized in the upper metalevels of the IFF, and the lower metalevel of the IFF has axiomatized various institutions (information flow, equational logic, many sorted first order logic, the common logic standard) in which semantic integration has a natural expression