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A Survey of Top-level Ontologies
A Survey of Top-level Ontologies - Appendix C
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The extract from the Pathway requirements for a Foundation Data Model (Hetherington, 2020) document in Appendix A contains a summary of the coverage requirements in ISO IEC 21838-1:2019 – Information technology – Top-Level Ontologies (TLO) – Part 1: Requirements (ISO, 2019) – Section 4.4.6: Documentation demonstrating breadth of coverage – extracted in Appendix B.
Table 9 maps the coverage items onto the items in the assessment framework.
The coverage items were designed for assessing the description of a single TLO rather than assessing a collection of the, so it is no surprise that the mapping is many to many.
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Coverage Item
Description
Assessment Framework
Time, space and place
How does the ontology deal with time and space-time? How does the ontology deal with places, locations, shape, holes and a vacuum?
horizontal aspect:
- spacetime
- locations
- immaterial
universal:
- interpenetration
- time
Actuality and possibility
How does the ontology deal with what could happen or what could be the case, such as where multiple data sets give conflicting stories on the behaviour of a network?
Universal:
- possibilia
Conflicting datasets are per se an epistemic not an ontological matter.
Classes and types
How does the ontology deal with issues of classification?
vertical aspect:
- parent-arity
- boundedness
- stratification
- formal generation
- relation class-ness
universal:
- criteria of identity
Time and change
How does the ontology deal with time and change?
horizontal aspect:
- spacetime
Parts, wholes, unity and boundaries
How does the ontology deal with relations of parthood?
vertical aspect:
- formal generation
horizontal aspect:
- spacetime
- locations
- immaterial
universal:
- interpenetration
Scale and granularity
How does the ontology deal with scale, resolution and granularity?
Is an epistemic concern.
Qualities and other attributes
How does the ontology deal with qualities and other qualitative attributes?
horizontal aspect:
- properties
Quantities and mathematical entities
How does the ontology deal with quantitative data and with mathematical data and theories?
universal:
- materialism
Processes and events
How does the ontology deal with processes?
horizontal aspect:
- endurants
Constitution
How does the ontology deal with the relation – sometimes referred to as a relation of “constitution” – between material entities and the material of which, at any given time, they are made?
horizontal aspect:
- spacetime
- locations
- immaterial
universal:
- interpenetration
Causality
How does the ontology deal with causality?
Low level
Information and reference
How does the ontology deal with information entities?
Low level
Artefacts and socially constructed entities
How does the ontology deal with artefacts (e.g. engineered items) and socially constructed items like money and laws?
Low level
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Continue to next section: Appendix D - Candidate source top-level ontologies - longlist (database of top-level ontologies)