FAUST@FOIS - 8th Workshop on Foundational Ontology

Taking a constructional turn to radically enrich a top ontology’s foundation: a case history
(Chris Partridge, Andrew Mitchell, Sergio de Cesare, Andreas Cola, Mesbah Khan, Justin Price and Alexander Hierl)

Talk by Chris Partidge

Research Questions: What does it mean to have a constructional ontology in practice?
what are the practical advantages of adopting such an approach?

Constructionalism: Shifting the way an ontology is defined.

BORO
-includes a foundational (or upper) ontology and closely intertwined methodology for IS re-engeneering.
- was originally conceived in the late 1980s in a real world project.

Using BORO as a constructionalist ontology

There is something named Ontology Sandbox that he uses to build ontologies.

Practical advantages and Issues to Overcome
- categorical transparency, dependency, reduction and consistency, as well as simplicity and explanatory
- however, these qualities are for the most part, broad theoretical advantages whose immediate practicality ius less obvious.
- cannot easily piggy-back on top ontology's semantic interoperability claim because the constructional turn did not change the base form of the top ontology.

This is according to him the best attempt to explain the proposed approach (more detail in the paper):

The Mereology of Concepts: Preliminary Explorations Guendalina Righetti Different theories on concepts: for example Features vs. Concepts. While the first is an exemplar theory, the latter is a prototypical one.

Do concepts have parts in the constructional perspective?

Rigid vs Variable Embodiments
Time absolute parthoold - sandwich example
rigid embodiment: a certain form R (principle of rigit embodiment) is embodied in some fixed matter)
slice1, slice2, ham/R

Time variable embodiment - river example (The variation of the amount of water in a river).
Variable environment of F: the object selecte dby ausuitable function F or principle (from times to things)

Another way of seeing this:

Variable embodiment is not a new notion. The idea of this paper is to verify if this may also be used to conceive concepts. Example:

When everything in a car is changed, is it still the same concept?

Semi-vriable embodiments - some parts can change but others are essential. E.g. "Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds" - Nick Cave is the essential part; In a concert, a band would be an essential part while the participants could vary.