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Foundational Ontology

Definition

  • "while a top-level ontology is a classification system that deals with general domain-independent categories only, a foundational ontology is a top-level (formal) ontology that has been built and motivated by the upfront and explicit choice of its core principles” (Borgo and Hitzler, 2018)

Benefits

one does not have to ‘reinvent the wheel’ with respect to the basic categories and relations to represent the subject domain,
it improves overall quality of the ontology by using principled design decisions, and
it facilitates interoperability among ontologies that are aligned to the same foundational ontology.

From the viewpoint of Ontology, a foundational ontology serves to clarify philosophical details and be upfront about them, bring assumptions to the fore and justify them, and, with that, it may become clear where there are any philosophical agreements and disagreements and what their underlying causes are.

A subset of domain ontology developers do not see a benefit:

they consider them too abstract, too expressive and comprehensive for the envisioned ontology-driven information system, and
it takes excessive effort to understand them in sufficient detail such that it would not weigh up to the benefits.

References

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