Thing Foundational Ontology: ThingFO v1.3's Terms, Properties, Relationships and Axioms

TL;DR

This paper details the specifications and axioms of ThingFO v1.3, a foundational ontology for Things within a five-tier ontological architecture, enhancing semantic clarity and inter-level relations.

Contribution

It introduces an updated version of ThingFO with detailed terms, properties, and axioms, and clarifies its role within the FCD-OntoArch architecture.

Findings

Defines all terms, properties, and axioms of ThingFO v1.3

Describes the five-tier ontological architecture FCD-OntoArch

Provides guidelines for ontology placement and constraints

Abstract

This preprint specifies and defines all terms, properties, relationships and axioms of ThingFO (Thing Foundational Ontology) v1.3, which is a slightly updated version of its predecessor, ThingFO v1.2. It is an ontology for particular and universal Things placed at the foundational level in the context of a five-tier ontological architecture named FCD-OntoArch (Foundational, Core, Domain and instance Ontological Architecture for sciences). Figure 2 depicts its five tiers, which entail Foundational, Core, Top-Domain, Low-Domain and Instance levels. Two guidelines and three rules that guide the placement and constraints of ontologies in this ontological architecture are documented in a separate section. Each level is populated with ontological components or, in other words, ontologies. Ontologies at the same level can be related to each other, except at the foundational level, where only the ThingFO ontology is found. In addition, ontologies' terms and relationships at lower levels can be semantically enriched by ontologies' terms and relationships from the higher levels. ThingFO and ontologies at the core level such as ProcessCO, SituationCO, among others, are domain independent or neutral. ThingFO is made up of three main concepts, namely: Thing, Thing Category, and Assertion that represents human expressions about different aspects of particular and universal Things. Figure 1 shows the conceptualization of ThingFO specified in the UML language. Note that annotations of updates from the previous version (v1.2) to the current one (v1.3) can be found in Appendix A.