A Core Ontology for the Abductive Theory of Method

Tezira Wanyana, Deshendran Moodley

Abstract: We introduce the ATOM core ontology (ACO), a mid-level, reusable ontology that operationalizes the abduc-tive theory of method (ATOM) for scientific discovery. ACO formalizes the scientific discovery process from data to phenomena and phenomena to explanatory theories, and distinguishes theory maturation from plausible theories to potential theories and potential theories to strong theories. It is dual-anchored i.e., ontologically to BFO and to PROV-O for provenance, leveraging a published BFO-PROV-O mapping. We developed ACO following UPON and authored it in Protégé making use of standard OWL constructs. Consistency was verified with standard reasoners, and fitness for use was assessed by instantiating ACO in two domains i.e., domestic electricity consumption and arrhythmia detection where competency questions were executed as SPARQL queries over the domain ontologies. Using established design criteria for core ontologies, ACO fully meets axiomatization and formal precision, modular

External IDs:dblp:conf/icaart/WanyanaM26