Abstract

We report our experiences of converting a carefully defined informal ontology expressed in natural language into the formal language: Ontolingua. The objectives of this paper are 1) to explore some of the nitty gritty details of formalising ontology definitions and 2) to serve as a basis for clarifying the relationship between this and other approaches to ontology construction (e.g. using competency questions), for the eventual aim of producing a comprehensive methodology. We first discuss concepts in the meta-ontology, including entities, classes, instances, relationships, roles, sets and states of affairs. With respect to roles, we define a special meta-class to classify objects whose existence necessarily depends on their being in a relationship with some other entity (e.g a customer). We describe a mechanism for classifying states of affairs which can be used to restrict what can be in certain relationships (e.g pre-condition). We then note some general issues that arise when produ...

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