The IFF Foundation for Ontological Knowledge Organization

TL;DR

This paper presents an axiomatic approach for integrating ontologies using the Information Flow Framework, emphasizing alignment and unification processes to facilitate ontology sharing and fusion in digital information systems.

Contribution

It extends previous information flow approaches to first-order logic and introduces a two-step process for ontology integration involving alignment and unification.

Findings

Proposes an axiomatic framework for ontology integration.

Defines a two-step process: alignment and unification.

Utilizes the IFF for organizing ontological information.

Abstract

This paper discusses an axiomatic approach for the integration of ontologies, an approach that extends to first order logic a previous approach (Kent 2000) based on information flow. This axiomatic approach is represented in the Information Flow Framework (IFF), a metalevel framework for organizing the information that appears in digital libraries, distributed databases and ontologies (Kent 2001). The paper argues that the integration of ontologies is the two-step process of alignment and unification. Ontological alignment consists of the sharing of common terminology and semantics through a mediating ontology. Ontological unification, concentrated in a virtual ontology of community connections, is fusion of the alignment diagram of participant community ontologies - the quotient of the sum of the participant portals modulo the ontological alignment structure.