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Legal Ontology Engineering pp 17–55Cite as

On Ontologies

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Part of the book series: Law, Governance and Technology Series ((LGTS,volume 3))

Abstract

What is an ontology? This chapter offers an in-depth introduction to the different definitions of ontologies offered by relevant authors over these last years, and also includes an overview of other relevant ontology design criteria and a description of ontology types.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A similar definition may be found in Gruber (1992).

  2. 2.

    “The Knowledge Level Hypothesis: There exists a distinct computer systems level, lying immediately above the symbol level, which is characterized by knowledge as the medium and the principle of rationality as the law of behavior” (Newell1981).

  3. 3.

    Hoekstra (2001) notes that “according to this definition there is no requirement for an ontology to be formally grounded.”

  4. 4.

    N. Guarino is perhaps one of the authors that has dedicated most effort into the clarification of the meaning of the terms ontology, formal ontology and ontological commitment, together with the relation to its philosophical counterpart and its distinction with epistemology. See (Guarino et al. 1994a, b; Guarino and Giaretta 1995; Guarino 1995; 1997a, b, 1998). Also the works of Sowa (1995, 2000) have been largely influenced by philosophical contributions, especially from C.S. Peirce and A.N. Whitehead (although he also takes into account I. Kant, E. Husserl, or M. Heidegger). This author is well-known for his contribution to the development of conceptual graphs (see, for example, Sowa (1976, 1980) for further insight into his earlier research.

  5. 5.

    Guarino and Giaretta (1995) proposed to use Ontology, with capital “O” to refer to the philosophical discipline. A distinction that has become generally accepted by the AI community.

  6. 6.

    “The problem with Gruber’s definition, however, is that it relies on an extensional notion of conceptualization which, while being compatible with the preliminary characterization given in the previous section, does not fit our purposes of defining what an ontology is. We have already pointed to this problem in Guarino et al. (1994b); we shall discuss it here in detail, proposing an alternative, intensional definition of conceptualization which satisfies our needs” (Guarino and Giaretta 1995).

  7. 7.

    An extensive discussion on the subject may be found in Guarino (1995).

  8. 8.

    See (Guarino and Giaretta 1995; Uschold and King1995) for further comments on this point.

  9. 9.

    “Ontologies are concerned with static domain knowledge while PSMs deal with modeling reasoning processes. A PSM defines a way of achieving the goal of a task. It has inputs and outputs and may decompose a task into subtasks, and tasks into methods. In addition, a PSM specifies the data flow between its subtasks. An important PSM component is its method ontology because it describes the concepts used by the method on the reasoning process as well as the relationships between such concepts” (Gómez-Pérez et al. 2003).

  10. 10.

    See the work of Rodríguez-Aguilar (2001), Schneider and Cunningham (2003), Boella and van der Torre (2004a, b), Boella et al. (2005), Vázquez-Salceda et al. (2005) and Aldewereld et al. (2006).

  11. 11.

    The authors take a definition of ontology from a knowledge base perspective “as a system of concepts/vocabularies used as primitives for building artificial systems”, because they are interested in knowledge for problem solving, “rather than knowledge in general” (Mizoguchi et al. 1995).

  12. 12.

    Later, Uschold and Jasper (1999) also added that ontologies could not only be distinguished for the degree of formality but also for their amount of formality (restriction of possible interpretations and reduction of ambiguity), resulting in ontologies rich in meaning or hi-fat ontologies and low-fat ontologies or ontologies less rich in meaning.

  13. 13.

    See Uschold and King (1995), Uschold and Grüninger (1996b), Uschold (1996) and Uschold and Jasper (1999) for further details.

  14. 14.

    In Uschold and Grüninger (1996b) knowledge acquisition did not appear in the category of systems engineering benefits and search and maintenance were added by Uschold and Jasper (1999).

  15. 15.

    For instance, Cyc, see Lenat et al. (1985), Lenat and Guha (1990) and Lenat (1995).

  16. 16.

    For example, WordNet, see Miller (1995) or visit http://wordnet.princeton.edu, retrieved November 10, 2008.

  17. 17.

    It is important to note that the authors make an explicit distinction between domain ontologies and domain knowledge. The latter describes factual situations in a certain domain.

  18. 18.

    Already present in Guarino (1997b).

  19. 19.

    “In contrast with ‘lightweight’ ontologies, which focus on a minimal terminological structure (often just a taxonomy) fitting the needs of a specific community, the main purpose of foundational ontologies is to negotiate meaning, either for enabling effective cooperation among multiple artificial agents, or for establishing consensus in a mixed society where artificial agents cooperate with human beings” (Gangemi et al. 2002).

  20. 20.

    Took into account previous work of several authors, Chandrasekaran and colleagues (Bylander and Chandrasekaran 1987; Chandrasekaran1986) and Fensel et al. (1996).

  21. 21.

    For Studer et al. (1998), the different levels of generality of an ontology (for KE) correspond to different levels of reusability.

  22. 22.

    This distinction is similar to Studer et al. (1998)’s static domain knowledge and dynamic reasoning knowledge.

  23. 23.

    They also provided a typology of ontologies regarding their richness of internal structure, inspired by Lassila and McGuinness (2001) and McGuinness (2003). However, the list presented by Gómez-Pérez et al. (2003) included also informal representations of knowledge (e.g., glossaries and thesauri).

  24. 24.

    At first, general and meta-ontologies (also referred to as core or generic ontologies) were first considered to be differentiated types of ontologies. However, in later publications, meta-ontologies disappeared as a class and general ontologies took the content of meta-ontologies. Therefore, originally, general ontologies included “a vocabulary related to things, events, time, space, causality, behavior, function, etc.” and were based on only on Mizoguchi et al. (1995). So, the Mereology ontology was an example of a meta-ontology, based only on van Heijst et al. (1997b) (Gómez-Pérez 1999; Corcho et al. 2001).

  25. 25.

    In this sense categorizations can be made in reference not on the subject of their conceptualization but on the richness of their internal structure. The more expressive ontologies are the ones that express general logical constraints (Lassila and McGuinness2001; Gómez-Pérez et al. 2003).

  26. 26.

    This leads to the so-called reusability-usability trade-off : the more reusable an ontology is, the less usable it becomes. It is, in fact, obvious, that a top level ontology regarding Time, Space and Objects is far more reusable across different domains than an ontology regarding Wine. Generality increases reusability, but it should be noted that clear ontological commitments and clear distinctions between PSM and domain knowledge may do as well.

  27. 27.

    Bench-Capon (2001) emphasises that “I content that task neutrality is a chimera: the most that can be achieved is an ontology which is even-handed between several, identified tasks.” (Emphasis in the original) Also, “[w]hat ontologies cannot do is make the knowledge available for effort-free reuse. Nor in my view, can ontologies be sensibly developed except in the context of a particular task.” “So, let us build ontologies for particular systems as part of our development methodology. But let us not build ontologies not driven by any task, in the hope that they may one day prove to be the answer to every problem that may in a domain.”

  28. 28.

    McCarty’s Language for Legal Discourse, Stamper’s NORMA formalism, Valente’s Functional Ontology of Law and Van Kralingen and Visser’s Frame-Based Ontology, although only Valente’s and Van Kralingen and Visser’s had been proposed as ontologies of the legal domain. “As far as our list is concerned, at the time of this research only two of the four ontologies were actually proposed as ontologies and are described in a dedicated ontology language (viz. LFU and FBO). The other two proposals (viz LLD and NOR) are representational formalisms from which we (viz. the authors) have derived some of their underlying ontological assumptions” (Visser and Bench-Capon 1998b).

  29. 29.

    This author also considers that the term ‘ontology’ should not be used when referring to domain-independent knowledge representations – representation languages – (Valente2005). Also, although the origins of ontologies were related to knowledge sharing and reuse, most ontologies are built “with some application in mind.”

  30. 30.

    This view is also taken by Breuker et al. (2007).

  31. 31.

    As does the generic definition by (Haase et al.2006) “[o]ntologies are artefacts that are designed for a specific purpose to satisfy certain requirements and needs emerging in the real world.”

  32. 32.

    For example, “[a]ssessing the epistemological completeness of an ontology is problematic because in order to determine whether an ontology facilitates the modelling of some piece of legal knowledge we need to identify this piece of knowledge first. This requires at least some commonly accepted theory about legal knowledge that tells us what pieces of knowledge exist in the legal domain. The problem is that we do not have such a theory. Briefly stated, there is no golden standard for the comparison” (Visser and Bench-Capon1997).

  33. 33.

    Most authors refer to representation frameworks as also representation ontologies or meta-ontologies. Towards this division we take especially into account the works of Gruber (1993b), Uschold and King (1995), Uschold and Grüninger (1996b), and Uschold (1996).

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    Núria Casellas

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Casellas, N. (2011). On Ontologies. In: Legal Ontology Engineering. Law, Governance and Technology Series, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1497-7_2

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