One factor exacerbating the failure to arrive at a common approach has been the lack of open-source applications that would permit the testing of different ontologies in the same computational environment.
Some upper ontologies—Cyc is often cited as an example in this regard—are very large, ranging up to thousands of elements (classes, relations), with complex interactions among them and with a complexity similar to that of a human natural language, and the learning process can be even longer than for a natural language because of the unfamiliar format and logical rules.
The motivation to overcome this learning barrier is largely absent because of the paucity of publicly accessible examples of use.
have been made to impose or define a single set of concepts as more primal, basic, foundational, authoritative, true or rational than all others.
to such attempts points out that humans lack the sort of transcendent perspective — or God's eye view — that would be required to achieve this goal.
Humans are bound by language or culture, and so lack the sort of objective perspective from which to observe the whole terrain of concepts and derive any one standard.
Given such a diversity of answers to the question of what the ontological categories are, by what criteria could we possibly choose among them to determine which is uniquely correct?"
This pragmatic philosophical position surrenders all hope of devising the encoded ontology version of "The world is everything that is the case."
Ethically, any general-purpose ontology could quickly become an actual tyranny by recruiting adherents into a political program designed to propagate it and its funding means, and possibly defend it by violence.
Historically, inconsistent and irrational belief systems have proven capable of commanding obedience to the detriment or harm of persons both inside and outside a society that accepts them.
Many of those who doubt the possibility of developing wide agreement on a common upper ontology fall into one of two traps: In fact, different representations of assertions about the real world (though not philosophical models), if they accurately reflect the world, must be logically consistent, even if they focus on different aspects of the same physical object or phenomenon.
If any two assertions about the real world are logically inconsistent, one or both must be wrong, and that is a topic for experimental investigation, not for ontological representation.
Objections based on the different ways people perceive things attack a simplistic, impoverished view of ontology.
Adopting this tactic permits effort to be focused on agreement only on a limited number of ontology elements.
An upper ontology based on such a set of primitive elements can include alternative views, provided that they are logically compatible.
However, people can assign different truth values to a particular assertion while accepting the validity of certain underlying claims, facts, or ways of expressing an argument with which they disagree.
For instance, wiki as a medium may permit such confusion but disciplined users can apply dispute resolution methods to sort out their conflicts.
If the problem is as basic as opponents of upper ontologies claim, then, it also applies to a group of humans trying to cooperate, who might need machine assistance to communicate easily.
The Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) framework developed by Barry Smith and his associates consists of a series of sub-ontologies at different levels of granularity.
A continuant domain ontology descending from BFO can be conceived as an inventory of entities existing at a time.
The IDEAS (International Defence Enterprise Architecture Specification for exchange) standard is based upon BORO, which in turn was used to develop DODAF 2.0.
Although "CIDOC object-oriented Conceptual Reference Model" (CRM) is a domain ontology, specialised to the purposes of representing cultural heritage, a subset called CRM Core is a generic upper ontology, including:[14][15] A persistent item is a physical or conceptional item that has a persistent identity recognized within the duration of its existence by its identification rather than by its continuity or by observation.
As implied by its acronym, DOLCE is oriented toward capturing the ontological categories underlying natural language and human common sense.
Rather, the categories it introduces are thought of as cognitive artifacts, which are ultimately depending on human perception, cultural imprints, and social conventions.
In this sense, they intend to be just descriptive (vs prescriptive) notions, which support the formal specification of domain conceptualizations.
DOLCE-Ultralite,[17] designed by Aldo Gangemi and colleagues at the Semantic Technology Lab of National Research Council (Italy) is the Web Ontology Language (OWL) version of DOLCE.
It simplifies some modal axioms of DOLCE, and extends it to cover the Descriptions and Situations framework, also designed in the WonderWeb project.
gist has been used to build enterprise ontologies for a number of major commercial and governmental agencies including: Procter & Gamble, Sentara Healthcare, Washington State Department of Labor & Industries, LexisNexis, Sallie Mae and two major Financial Services firms.
It includes an upper ontology, created by the IEEE working group P1600.1 (originally by Ian Niles and Adam Pease).
WordNet, a freely available database originally designed as a semantic network based on psycholinguistic principles, was expanded by addition of definitions and is now also viewed as a dictionary.