Re: [HCLS] Bridging Ontologies - with Foundational Ontologies

I also think that smaller foundational ontologies like DOLCE are the key to interoperability between ontologies. It seems like the only way to ensure good interoperability is the agreement on some basic structures and design patterns. When two OWL ontologies are based on two totally different world-views to start with, it becomes almost impossible to build a bridge between the two that serves some practical use. Maybe we should look more into the use of foundational ontologies and best-practices of their use and extension, and less on the alignment of ontologies that have already developed into totally different directions

In metaphoric words: Our task is not to build brigdes between stray villages on different islands. Our task is to find the most livable island and tell all of the villagers to settle there.

> Unfortunately, bio-zen was more oriented to concepts at the
> molecular
> level than for my needs, but any connection made to DOLCE would
> automatically orient themselves with bio-zen (or any other
> derivatives).

Great to hear that! It really seems that most of the promises of semantic web ontologies are only realised when top-level ontologies like DOLCE are used. Maybe we should evaluate the potential use of DOLCE or BFO for the BioRDF tasks? 

kind regards,
Matthias Samwald

Received on Tuesday, 22 August 2006 09:11:18 UTC