The objective of this research programme is to contribute to the establishment of the emerging science of Formal Ontology in Information Systems via a collaborative project involving researchers from a range of disciplines including philosophy, logic, computer science, linguistics, and the medical sciences. The re­searchers will work together on the construction of a unified formal ontology, which means: a general framework for the construction of ontological theories in specific domains. The framework will be constructed using the axiomatic-deductive method of modern (...) formal ontology. It will be tested via a series of applications relating to on-going work in Leipzig on medical taxonomies and data dictionaries in the context of clinical trials. This will lead to the production of a domain-specific ontology which is designed to serve as a basis for applications in the medical field. (shrink)

A formal theory of the ecological niche is indispensable not only for semantic precision in philosophy to understand and compare it with other meanings of niche, but also when computer scientists and ecologists desire to create interoperable software where one can retrieve the niche of a species and compare their parameters. The proposed model is a more fine-grained description of the ecological niche, including the distinction between its complex concept, the abstract niche (‘fundamental niche’) with its hypervolume in multidimensional space, (...) and its realisations (‘realised niches’). The presented ecological niche may initiate new avenues for research in ecology, particularly concerning the conditions/categories of a hypervolume, as well as further philosophical inquiry and comparison with other niches. (shrink)