The Institutional Approach

TL;DR

This chapter presents the institutional approach, a category-theoretic framework for organizing and maintaining ontologies, integrating concepts from formal concept analysis, information flow, and knowledge representation.

Contribution

It introduces the institutional approach as a unifying, category-theoretic framework for ontology management, combining multiple theories and applications.

Findings

Unifies lattice and distributed logic approaches to ontologies.

Uses category theory to formalize ontology organization and maintenance.

Supports semantic integration and comparison of ontologies.

Abstract

This chapter discusses the institutional approach for organizing and maintaining ontologies. The theory of institutions was named and initially developed by Joseph Goguen and Rod Burstall. This theory, a metatheory based on category theory, regards ontologies as logical theories or local logics. The theory of institutions uses the category-theoretic ideas of fibrations and indexed categories to develop logical theories. Institutions unite the lattice approach of Formal Concept Analysis of Ganter and Wille with the distributed logic of Information Flow of Barwise and Seligman. The institutional approach incorporates locally the lattice of theories idea of Sowa from the theory of knowledge representation. The Information Flow Framework, which was initiated within the IEEE Standard Upper Ontology project, uses the institutional approach in its applied aspect for the comparison, semantic integration and maintenance of ontologies. This chapter explains the central ideas of the institutional approach to ontologies in a careful and detailed manner.