Towards Applied Constructional Ontology

Stefano Borgo, Guendalina Righetti

Abstract: In a keynote at FOIS 2024, Øystein Linnebo proposed and motivated the reassessment and reconstruction of foundational formal ontologies via the constructive approaches exploited in philosophical logic. The proposal has attracted attention due to a series of potentially positive consequences: conceptual clarity on the adopted entities and constructors, structural clarity regarding the ontology organisation, completeness of the ontology relative to the combinatorics of elements and operators, and conceptual and logical consistency of the whole system. It remains unclear how the constructive approach would work on today’s foundational ontologies, and how it can cope with the concerns that led to building such systems. To start addressing this issue, in this paper we consider three approaches on foundational ontologies like BFO, DOLCE and UFO, to investigate how these systems might be seen as contructive-like structures. This analysis is a first step towards Linnebo’s proposal, it serves to highlight aspects that require more investigation to implement the proposal, and suggests what kind of work and considerations are needed to turn today’s foundational formal ontologies into constructive-based ontological systems.

External IDs:doi:10.3233/faia250480