s. The Plinius ontology was developed to support the translation of natural-language sentences into expressions in a knowledge representation language [31]. Those design decisions taken during the development of the ontology which appeared to be domain-independent have been proposed as general ontology development principles. These are: (1) conflicting assertions about the same entity can be more readily discovered if the concepts are defined as fully as possible. (2) pre-existing formal theories are taken as given and a domain ontology does not specify the semantics of logical constants. (3) an ontology should be independent of any particular knowledge representation language. (4) the principle of the conceptual construction kit states that an ontology consists of primitives concepts and construction rules that allow the definition of all other concepts in terms of these primitives. (5) a bottom-up approach is taken in order that the ontology exhibits sufficient completeness for the...