The representation of knowledge domains and a theory of representation

the foundational ontology

Abstract

The need to provide information in an unambiguous and effective way has motivated the increasing use of ontologies, whose formalism allows greater precision inmodels of information representation. In this scenario, foundational ontologies have a leading role in defining formally free-domain concepts, and provide a solid theoretical foundation to support the building of domain-specific vocabularies. The understanding of the concepts formalized in foundational ontologies with philosophical basis, must be appropriated by the information scientist, in order to enable him to act in this new scenario, where the representation of information should be directed not onlyfor human understanding, but also for its computational treatment, by using inferences. The purpose of this paper is to present some of these notions contained in the foundational ontology UFO-A, and illustrate, with an example, the semantic differential of a model underpinned by such ontology, in contrast to what could be represented using a thesaurus.