Tools for Assembling Modular Ontologies in Ontolingua

The Ontolingua ontology development environment provides a suite of ontology authoring tools and a library of modular reusable ontologies. The environment is available as a World Wide Web service and has a substantial user community. The tools in Ontolingua are oriented toward authoring of ontologies by assembling and extending ontologies obtained from the library. In this paper, we describe Ontolingua's formalism for combining the axioms, definitions, and non-logical symbols of multiple ontologies. We also describe Ontolingua's facilities that enable renaming of non-logical symbols from multiple component ontologies and that disambiguate symbol references during input and output. These features of Ontolingua support cyclic inclusion graphs and enable users to extend ontologies in multiple ways such as adding simplifying assumptions and extending the domains of polymorphic operators.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Richard Fikes, Adam Farquhar, James Rice
• Keywords: AAAI 1997, Intelligent Agents, Modular Reusable Ontologies, Multiple Component Ontologies, Ontologies