Abstract
The intuitive simplicity of the so-called is-a (or subsumption) relationship has led to widespread ontological misuse. Where previous work has focused largely on the semantics of the relationship itself, we concentrate here on the ontological nature of its arguments, in order to tell whether a single is-a link is ontologically well-founded. For this purpose, we introduce some techniques based on the philosophical notions of identity, unity, and essence, which have been adapted to the needs of taxonomy design. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these techniques by taking real examples of poorly structured taxonomies and revealing cases of invalid generalization.
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Guarino, N., Welty, C. (2002). Identity and Subsumption. In: Green, R., Bean, C.A., Myaeng, S.H. (eds) The Semantics of Relationships. Information Science and Knowledge Management, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0073-3_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0073-3_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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