This paper proposes a reformulation of the treatment of boundaries, at parts and aggregates of entities in Basic Formal Ontology. These are currently treated as mutually exclusive, which is inadequate for biological representation since some entities may simultaneously be at parts, boundaries and/or aggregates. We introduce functions which map entities to their boundaries, at parts or aggregations. We make use of time, space and spacetime projection functions which, along the way, allow us to develop a simple temporal theory.

Roles remain nebulous entities, notwithstanding their extensive interdisciplinary research. This paper argues through a meta-ontological conceptual tool of grounding that there are three key facets of roles: a role position, a role specification, and a role potential. A foundational perspective on roles can be specified by “role choices” as to which facet of roles is primary. Role choices are illustrated with theories of roles that are built in compliance with four well-known upper ontologies: GFO, DOLCE, BFO, and UFO. The relationship (...) between such three facets of roles and the GFO-based three kinds of roles (relational, processual, and social) is closely examined. These three facets are also comparatively studied from linguistic (e.g. ‘have a role’ versus ‘play a role’) and methodological (realism versus conceptualism regarding ontology design) perspectives. Furthermore, the family resemblance view of roles as “epistemic trackers” is proposed: the general notion of role is merely (partially) unified by its three facets and helps to keep track of some entity with respect to its role-related aspects. Finally, defining characteristics of roles in conceptual modeling are considered in terms of the three-facet theory. This work provides the grist for future practical development of an ontological module for generic role representation. (shrink)

In the domain of ontology design as well as in Knowledge Representation, modeling universals is a challenging problem.Most approaches that have addressed this problem rely on Description Logics (DLs) but many difficulties remain, due to under-constrained representation which reduces the inferences that can be drawn and further causes problems in expressiveness. In mathematical logic and program checking, type theories have proved to be appealing but, so far they have not been applied in the formalization of ontologies. To bridge this gap, (...) we present in this paper a theory for representing ontologies in a dependently typed framework which relies on strong formal foundations including both a constructive logic and a functional type system. The language of this theory defines in a precise way what ontological primitives such as classes, relations, properties, etc., and thereof roles, are. The first part of the paper details how these primitives are defined and used within the theory. In a second part, we focus on the formalization of the role primitive. A review of significant role properties leads to the specification of a role profile and most of the remaining work details through numerous examples, how the proposed theory is able to fully satisfy this profile. It is demonstrated that dependent types can model several non-trivial aspects of roles including a formal solution for generalization hierarchies, identity criteria for roles and other contributions. A discussion is given on how the theory is able to cope with many of the constraints inherent in a good role representation. (shrink)

yamato sharply distinguishes itself from other existing upper ontologies in the following respects. Most importantly, yamato is designed with both engineering and philosophical minds. yamato is based on a sophisticated theory of roles, given that the world is full of roles. yamato has a tenable theory of functions which helps to deal with artifacts effectively. Information is a ‘content-bearing’ entity and it differs significantly from the entities that philosophers have traditionally discussed. Taking into account the modern society in which a (...) flood of information occurs, yamato has a sophisticated theory of informational objects. Quality and quantity are carefully organized for the sake of greater interoperability of real-world data. The philosophical contribution of yamato includes a theory of objects, processes, and events. Those features are illustrated with several case studies. These features lead to the intensive application of yamato in some domains such as biomedicine and learning engineering. (shrink)