ISO/IEC 21838

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ISO/IEC 21838 [1] is a multi-part standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in 2001, which outlines requirements for top-level ontology development and describes several top-level ontologies that satisfy those requirements, including Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), [2] Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE), and TUpper. ISO/IEC 21838 is intended to promote interoperability among lower level, domain-specific ontologies, and to foster coherent ontology design, for example, through the coordinated re-engineering of legacy ontologies which have been developed using heterogeneous top-level categories.

Contents

Background

ISO/IEC 21838 was developed by Subcommittee 32 for Data Management and Interchange, [3] of the ISO and IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 for Information Technology. [4] The standard consists thus far of four parts:

Top-Level Ontology Requirements

ISO/IEC 21838-1 [1] prescribes the following requirements for any top-level ontology.

A TLO shall include a textual artifact represented by a natural language document providing:

In addition the TLO shall be made available via at least one machine-readable axiomatization in either:

The TLO shall further be made available via a Common Logic (CL) axiomatization conforming to ISO/IEC 24707.

The ontology documentation specified above shall be made publicly available and consist of:

Supplementary documentation shall be made publicly available:

Demonstrating Breadth of Coverage

To demonstrate a sufficiently broad coverage domain and thus to show that it is a true top-level ontology, each candidate TLO is required to show that it has a very wide range of application, ideally one that covers all entities in the universe. Given that the main purpose of the TLO is to enhance the data in a range of databases in such a way as to promote their integration and discoverability, it suffices to demonstrate that coverage domain of the candidate TLO extends across a very broad and diverse range of types of data which the terms in the ontology may then be used to annotate. The strategy for demonstrating breadth of coverage accordingly rests on the provision in ISO/IEC 21838-1 of a list of types of data, including data about:

Each candidate TLO is required to specify how it will deal with data under all, or nearly all, of these headings, or to specify ontologies built using this TLO which already serve this purpose. Basic Formal Ontology, for example (see below), has no native term for information entities such as sentences or data items or publications. These terms are however supplied by the BFO-conformant Information Artifact Ontology (IAO). [16]

Basic Formal Ontology as a Top-Level Ontology

ISO/IEC 21838-2 [5] describes how Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) satisfies the requirements of ISO/IEC 21838-1. BFO is an ontology developed by Barry Smith and his collaborators. A BFO textbook was published in 2015 [17] [18] to promote interoperability among the very large number of domain ontologies [19] [20] built using its terms and relational expressions. [21]

The BFO ontology is documented in the ISO Standards Maintenance Portal here. [22] This includes:

  1. A natural language document providing domain-neutral terms and relational expressions accompanied by concise, consistent, and non-circular definitions [23] for all non-primitive terms [24]
  2. A signature containing no terms or relational expressions used exclusively in one or in a restricted group of domains.
  3. An axiomatization in OWL 2 with the direct semantics. [25]
  4. An axiomatization in CL. [26]
  5. Specification of the logical derivability of the OWL axiomatization from the CL axiomatization, and breadth of ontology coverage.
  6. A specification of the different ways in which developers of ontologies at lower levels can demonstrate conformity to BFO.
  7. Reference to the statement of principles of use and management of the ontology provided by the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry, principles which are adopted by the BFO developer community. [27]

In addition, the community of BFO developers and users has provided:

  1. A publicly available ontology developers' guide, [24]
  2. Publicly available repositories for the OWL 2 and CL axiomatizations incorporating commentary on these axiomatizations and identifying candidate areas for revision. [28] [29] [30] [31]
  3. A publicly available list of ontologies reusing BFO and of organizations using BFO in their ontology development work, available at https://basic-formal-ontology.org/users.html.

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 "ISO/IEC 21838-1:2021". ISO. 14:00-17:00. Retrieved 2022-10-22.
  2. Jansen, Ludger; Brochhausen, Mathias. "KI und Philosophie: Begriffe in Schichten". FAZ.NET (in German). ISSN   0174-4909 . Retrieved 2022-11-18.
  3. "ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 32 - Data management and interchange". ISO. 3 March 2014. Retrieved 2022-10-29.
  4. "Home". JTC 1. Retrieved 2022-10-29.
  5. 1 2 "ISO/IEC 21838-2:2021". ISO. 14:00-17:00. Retrieved 2022-10-22.
  6. "Smith's ontology work recognized as global standard". www.buffalo.edu. Retrieved 2022-11-18.
  7. "ISO/IEC 21838-3:2023". ISO. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
  8. "ISO/IEC 21838-4:2023". ISO. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
  9. "OWL 2 Web Ontology Language Direct Semantics (Second Edition)". www.w3.org. Retrieved 2022-10-22.
  10. "Direct Semantics - OWL". www.w3.org. Retrieved 2022-10-22.
  11. "World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)". www.w3.org. Retrieved 2022-10-22.
  12. Arp, Robert; Smith, Barry. "Realizable Entities in Basic Formal Ontology" (PDF). Retrieved 31 March 2024.
  13. Arp, Robert; Smith, Barry (2008-06-03). "Function, Role, and Disposition in Basic Formal Ontology". Nature Precedings: 1. doi: 10.1038/npre.2008.1941.1 . ISSN   1756-0357.
  14. Smith, Barry (2012-12-01). "Classifying Processes: An Essay in Applied Ontology". Ratio. 25 (4): 463–488. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9329.2012.00557.x. ISSN   0034-0006. PMC   3718480 . PMID   23888086.
  15. "Aboutness: Towards Foundations for the Information Artifact Ontology" (PDF).
  16. "Information Artifact Ontology | NCBO BioPortal". bioportal.bioontology.org. Retrieved 2022-10-23.
  17. Arp, Robert (2015). Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology. Barry Smith, Andrew D. Spear. Cambridge, Massachusetts. ISBN   978-0-262-32958-3. OCLC   915940052.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  18. "Barry Smith - Ontology". ontology.buffalo.edu. Retrieved 2022-10-22.
  19. "OBO Foundry". obofoundry.org. Retrieved 2022-11-18.
  20. "Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) | Users". basic-formal-ontology.org. Retrieved 2022-10-22.
  21. Information technology. Top-level ontologies (TLO), BSI British Standards, doi:10.3403/30367605 , retrieved 2022-10-22
  22. "ISO Standards Maintenance Portal". standards.iso.org. Retrieved 2022-10-23.
  23. Seppälä, Selja; Smith, Barry; Ruttenberg, Alan; Schreiber, Yonatan (2016). "Definitions in ontologies" (PDF). Cahiers de Lexicologie. 109 (2): 175–207.
  24. 1 2 "Home · BFO-ontology/BFO Wiki". GitHub. Retrieved 2022-10-22.
  25. "BFO-2020/21838-2/owl at master · BFO-ontology/BFO-2020". GitHub. Retrieved 2022-10-22.
  26. "BFO-2020/21838-2/common-logic at master · BFO-ontology/BFO-2020". GitHub. Retrieved 2022-10-22.
  27. Principles – overview [viewed 2020-04-1] available at http://www.obofoundry.org/principles/fp-000-summary.html
  28. "BFO-2020/21838-2 at master · BFO-ontology/BFO-2020". GitHub. Retrieved 2022-10-22.
  29. "Ontobee: BFO". ontobee.org. Retrieved 2022-11-18.
  30. "Basic Formal Ontology | NCBO BioPortal". bioportal.bioontology.org. Retrieved 2022-11-18.
  31. "Basic Formal Ontology < Ontology Lookup Service < EMBL-EBI". www.ebi.ac.uk. Retrieved 2022-11-18.

Further reading

  1. Grenon, Pierre; Smith, Barry (March 2004). "SNAP and SPAN: Towards Dynamic Spatial Ontology". Spatial Cognition & Computation. 4 (1): 69–104. Bibcode:2004SpCC....4...69G. doi:10.1207/s15427633scc0401_5. S2CID   14469822.
  2. Munn, Katherine; Smith, Barry (2013). Applied Ontology: An Introduction. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag. ISBN   9783110324860.
  3. Neuhaus, Fabian; Grenon, Pierre; Smith, Barry (2004). "A Formal Theory of Substances, Qualities, and Universals". Formal Ontology in Information Systems. Amsterdam: IOS Press. pp. 49–59. ISBN   1586034685.
  4. "Basic Formal Ontology 2.0 - NCOR Wiki". ncorwiki.buffalo.edu. National Center for Ontological Research.
  5. Smith, Barry (15 February 2018). "Ontology for Systems Engineering (Short Version) 15 February 2018". YouTube .
  6. Spear, Andrew; Ceusters, Werner; Smith, Barry (2016). "Functions in Basic Formal Ontology". Applied Ontology. 11 (1). IOS Press: 103–128. doi:10.3233/AO-160164.
  7. Smith, Barry (2012). "On Classifying Material Entities in Basic Formal Ontology". Interdisciplinary Ontology. Proceedings of the Third Interdisciplinary Ontology Meeting. 3. Tokyo: Keio University Press: 1–13.