Ontological Architectures

Abstract

We distinguish between ontological architecture and ontology architecture, though they are closely related. Ontology architecture is emerging as a distinct discipline in ontology engineering – as an ontology development and deployment structure and methodology (Fernandéz et al., 1997). It necessarily also includes aspects of what is sometimes termed ontology lifecycle management (Andersen et al., 2006). In fact, ontology architecture can be considered to encompass ontology lifecycle management because the former lays out a general framework for the development, deployment, and maintenance of ontologies (which is the focus of lifecycle management), but also includes the interaction of applications and services that use ontologies, and an ontology tool and service infrastructure to support these. Ontological architecture is the architecture that is used to structure the ontologies that are employed by ontology architecture. As such, it addresses the levels of ontologies required (foundational, upper, middle, utility, reference, domain, and sub-domain ontologies), and mathematical, logical, and engineering constructs used to modularize ontologies in a large ontological space. This chapter focuses on ontological architecture, but it must be understood to underpin ontology architecture if only to ground/situate and enable the latter. Both kinds of architecture are relevant to ontology engineering, but we cannot address ontology architecture here until the very last section, when we look ahead. Instead, we focus on ontological architecture, which as it turns out, is a large enough topic.