The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) is an upper level ontology that has been proposed as a starter document for The Standard Upper Ontology Working Group, an IEEE-sanctioned working group of collaborators from the fields of engineering, philosophy, and information science. The SUMO provides definitions for general-purpose terms and acts as a foundation for more specific domain ontologies. In this paper we outline the strategy used to create the current version of the SUMO, discuss some of the challenges that we faced in constructing the ontology, and describe in detail its most general concepts and the relations between them. Categories & Descriptors --- I.2.4 [Knowledge Representation Formalisms and Methods]: Artificial Intelligence -- representations (procedural and rule-based), semantic networks. General Terms --- Documentation, Languages, Standard-ization, Theory. Keywords --- Ontologies, Knowledge Interchange Format.

The paper is a overview of the major qualitative spatial representation and reasoning techniques. We survey the main aspects of the representation of qualitative knowledge including ontological aspects, topology, distance, orientation and shape. We also consider qualitative spatial reasoning including reasoning about spatial change. Finally there is a discussion of theoretical results and a glimpse of future work. The paper is a revised and condensed version of [33, 34].

. The field of Qualitative Spatial Reasoning is now an active research area in its own right within AI (and also in Geographical Information Systems) having grown out of earlier work in philosophical logic and more general Qualitative Reasoning in AI. In this paper (which is an updated version of [25]) I will survey the state of the art in Qualitative Spatial Reasoning, covering representation and reasoning issues as well as pointing to some application areas. 1 What is Qualitative Reasoning? The principal goal of Qualitative Reasoning (QR) [129] is to represent not only our everyday commonsense knowledge about the physical world, but also the underlying abstractions used by engineers and scientists when they create quantitative models. Endowed with such knowledge, and appropriate reasoning methods, a computer could make predictions, diagnoses and explain the behaviour of physical systems in a qualitative manner, even when a precise quantitative description is not available 1 ...

The task of information extraction can be seen as a problem of semantic matching between a user-defined template and a piece of information written in natural language. To this purpose, the ontological assumptions of the template need to be suitably specified, and compared with the ontological implications of the text. So-called "ontologies", consisting of theories of various kinds expressing the meaning of shared vocabularies, begin to be used for this task. This paper addresses the theoretical issues related to the design and use of such ontologies for purposes of information retrieval and extraction. After a discussion on the nature of semantic matching within a model-theoretical framework, we introduce the subject of Formal Ontology, showing how the notions of parthood, integrity, identity, and dependence can be of help in understanding, organizing and formalizing fundamental ontological distinctions. We present then some basic principles for ontology design, and we illustrate a preliminary proposal for a top-level ontology develped according to such principles. As a concrete example of ontology-based information retrieval, we finally report an ongoing experience of use of a large linguistic ontology for the retrieval of object-oriented software components.

In this paper we discuss the development and application of a large formal ontology to the semantic web. The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) (Niles & Pease, 2001) (SUMO, 2002) is a "starter document" in the IEEE Standard Upper Ontology effort. This upper ontology is extremely broad in scope and can serve as a semantic foundation for search, interoperation, and communication on the semantic web.

This paper presents a calculus for mereotopological reasoning in which two-dimensional spatial regions are treated as primitive entities. A first order predicate language L with a distinguished unary predicate c(x), function-symbols +; : and \Gamma and constants 0 and 1 is defined. An interpretation R for L is provided in which polygonal open subsets of the real plane serve as elements of the domain. Under this interpretation the predicate c(x) is read as "region x is connected" and the function-symbols and constants are given their meaning in terms of a Boolean algebra of polygons. We give an alternative interpretation S based on the real closed plane which turns out to be isomorphic to R. A set of axioms and a rule of inference are introduced. We prove the soundness and completeness of the calculus with respect to the given interpretation.

The Region-Connection Calculus (RCC) is a well established formal system for qualitative spatial reasoning. It provides an axiomatization of space which takes regions as primitive, rather than as constructions from sets of points. The paper introduces boolean connection algebras (BCAs), and proves that these structures are equivalent to models of the RCC axioms. BCAs permit a wealth of results from the theory of lattices and boolean algebras to be applied to RCC. This is demonstrated by two theorems which provide constructions for BCAs from suitable distributive lattices. It is already well known that regular connected topological spaces yield models of RCC, but the theorems in this paper substantially generalize this result. Additionally, the lattice theoretic techniques used provide the first proof of this result which does not depend on the existence of points in regions. Keywords: Region-Connection Calculus, Qualitative Spatial Reasoning, Boolean Connection Algebra, Mer...

This paper presents a method for reasoning about spatial objects and their qualitative spatial relationships. In contrast to existing work, which mainly focusses on reasoning about qualitative spatial relations alone, we integrate quantitative and qualitative information with terminological reasoning. For spatioterminological reasoning we present the description logic ALCRP(D) and define an appropriate concrete domain D for polygons. The theory is motivated as a basis for knowledge representation and query processing in the domain of deductive geographic information systems. 1 Introduction Qualitative relations play an important role in formal reasoning systems that can be part of, for instance, geographic information systems (GIS). In this context, inferences about spatial relations should not be considered in isolation but should be integrated with formal inferences about structural descriptions of domain objects (e.g. automatic consistency checking and classification) and infer...

Several authors have suggested that a more parsimonious and conceptually elegant treatment of everyday mereological and topological reasoning can be obtained by adopting a spatial ontology in which regions, not points, are the primitive entities. This paper challenges this suggestion for mereotopological reasoning in 2-dimensional space. Our strategy is to define a mereotopological language together with a familiar, point-based interpretation. It is proposed that, to be practically useful, any alternative region-based spatial ontology must support the same sentences in our language as this familiar interpretation. This proposal has the merit of transforming a vague, open-ended question about ontologies for "practical" mereotopological reasoning into a precise question in model theory. We show that (a version of) the familiar interpretation is countable and atomic, and therefore prime. We conclude that useful alternative ontologies of the plane are, if anything, less parsimonious than the one which they are supposed to replace.

Abstract. This paper is concerned with certain ontological issues in the foundations of geographic representation. It sets out what these basic issues are, describes the tools needed to deal with them, and draws some implications for a general theory of spatial representation. Our approach has ramifications in the domains of mereology, topology, and the theory of location, and the question of the interaction of these three domains within a unified spatial representation theory is addressed. In the final part we also consider the idea of nonstandard geographies, which may be associated with geography under a classical conception in the same sense in which non-standard logics are associated with classical logic. 1.