UFO: Unified Foundational Ontology

Issue title: Foundational Ontologies in Action

Guest editors: Stefano Borgo, Antony Galton and Oliver Kutz

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Guizzardi, Giancarlo^{a; b; *} | Botti Benevides, Alessander^c | Fonseca, Claudenir M.^a | Porello, Daniele^d | Almeida, João Paulo A.^c | Prince Sales, Tiago^a

Affiliations: [a] Conceptual and Cognitive Modeling Research Group, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy | [b] Services & Cybersecurity Group, University of Twente, The Netherlands | [c] Ontology & Conceptual Modeling Research Group, Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil | [d] University of Genoa, Italy

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. E-mail: gguizzardi@unibz.it.

Note: [] Accepted by: Stefano Borgo

Abstract: The Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) was developed over the last two decades by consistently putting together theories from areas such as formal ontology in philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophical logics. It comprises a number of micro-theories addressing fundamental conceptual modeling notions, including entity types and relationship types. The aim of this paper is to summarize the current state of UFO, presenting a formalization of the ontology, along with the analysis of a number of cases to illustrate the application of UFO and facilitate its comparison with other foundational ontologies in this special issue. (The cases originate from the First FOUST Workshop – the Foundational Stance, an international forum dedicated to Foundational Ontology research.)

Keywords: UFO, OntoUML, foundational ontology, ontological analysis, formal ontology

DOI: 10.3233/AO-210256

Journal: Applied Ontology, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 167-210, 2022