Upper Level or Top Level Ontology Like Things

Ontologies improve communications.  Ontologies are effectively agreements.

Ontologies that are subject-independent are called upper-level or top-level ontologies, and they attempt to define entities and associations between entities that are shared by all areas of knowledge.

To our knowledge, no framework is available yet to determine the goodness of an ontology.  However, many criteria have been proposed.  A widely accepted set of criteria is the one discussed in Gruber (1993): clarity, coherence, extendibility, minimal encoding bias,   and   minimal   ontological   commitment.   First   and   foremost,   ontologies   should emphasize the characteristics of clarity and coherence. Clarity implies that definitions are context independent, and coherence  requires   consistency of the definitions.

The graphic below was provide on LinkedIn by Andre Gioia and provides a nice overview of the role that an upper ontology plays:


There are many different upper level ontologies: BFO, GEM, GIST,  UFO. So which upper level ontology is best? That has yet to be determined.

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