Problem of universals

Philosophy

Ontology learning

Semantic Web

Computer science

Natural language processing

Formal ontology

Formal description

Upper ontology

Ontology alignment

Ontology components

Epistemology

Ontology

Information retrieval

Programming language

Process ontology

Ontology-based data integration

Suggested Upper Merged Ontology

Applied Ontology

Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is a top-level ontology consisting of thirty-six classes, designed to support information integration, retrieval, and analysis across all domains of scientific investigation, presently employed in over 350 ontology projects around the world. BFO is a genuine top-level ontology, containing no terms particular to material domains, such as physics, medicine, or psychology. In this paper, we demonstrate how a series of cases illustrating common types of change may be represented by universals, defined classes, and relations employing the BFO framework. We provide discussion of these cases to provide a template for other ontologists using BFO, as well as to facilitate comparison with the strategies proposed by ontologists using different top-level ontologies.

BFO: Basic Formal Ontology1