Abstract
The central hypothesis of the collaboration between Language and Computing
(L&C) and the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information
Science (IFOMIS) is that the methodology and conceptual rigor of a
philosophically inspired formal ontology greatly benefits application
ontologies.[1] To this end LinKBase®, L&C’s ontology, which is designed to
integrate and reason across various external databases simultaneously, has
been submitted to the conceptual demands of IFOMIS’s Basic Formal
Ontology (BFO).[2] With this project we aim to move beyond the level of
controlled vocabularies to yield an ontology with the ability to support
reasoning applications. Our general procedure has been the implementation of
a meta-ontological definition space in which the definitions of all the concepts
and relations in LinKBase® are standardized in a framework of first-order
logic. In this paper we describe how this standardization has already led to an
improvement in the LinKBase® structure that allows for a greater degree of
internal coherence than ever before possible. We then show the use of this
philosophical standardization for the purpose of mapping external databases to
one another, using LinKBase® as translation hub, with a greater degree of
success than possible hitherto. We demonstrate how this offers a genuine
advance over other application ontologies that have not submitted themselves
to the demands of philosophical scrutiny.