Top-Level Ontologies

(8th-July-2020)

• For example, Figure 13.16 defines a domain ontology designed to be used by people who want to write a knowledge base that refers to apartment buildings. Each domain ontology implicitly or explicitly assumes a higher-level ontology that it can fit into. There is interest in building a coherent top-level ontology to which other ontologies can refer and into which they can fit. Fitting the domain ontologies into a higher-level ontology should make it easier to allow them to interoperate.

• One such ontology is BFO, the Basic Formal Ontology. The categories of BFO are given in Figure 13.7.