The Characterization of Abstract Truth and its Factorization

TL;DR

This paper discusses the importance of standardizing methods for relating different community ontologies to achieve semantic integration, facilitating coherence in human knowledge representation.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of characterizing abstract truth and its factorization to support semantic integration of diverse ontologies.

Findings

Highlights the relativity of ontological representations based on purpose.

Proposes frameworks for relating different community ontologies.

Emphasizes the need for standard methods in semantic integration.

Abstract

Human knowledge is made up of the conceptual structures of many communities of interest. In order to establish coherence in human knowledge representation, it is important to enable communication between the conceptual structures of different communities The conceptual structures of any particular community is representable in an ontology. Such a ontology provides a formal linguistic standard for that community. However, a standard community ontology is established for various purposes, and makes choices that force a given interpretation, while excluding others that may be equally valid for other purposes. Hence, a given representation is relative to the purpose for that representation. Due to this relativity of representation, in the larger scope of all human knowledge it is more important to standardize methods and frameworks for relating ontologies than to standardize any particular choice of ontology. The standardization of methods and frameworks is called the semantic integration of ontologies.