Ontology

Victor Raskin
Department of English and Interdepartmental Program in Linguistics, 324 Heavilon Hall, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907-1356, USA

1 INTRODUCTION
Ontology is an ambiguous term. It may be used synonymously with the philosophical discipline of metaphysics, an ancient and sometimes maligned theory of most basic categories. It may refer to a much newer discipline of formal ontology, based on mereology and topology, dealing with the formal, mathematical methods of representing elements of reality. And it may refer to engineering artifacts, conceptual structures, used in various applications. Ergonomics should be particularly and obviously interested in the last, engineering aspect of ontology because of the ergonomic focus on specific applications for specific tasks in specific domains. It is important, however, to lay out the philosophical and formal foundations of ontology because their understanding affects the engineering enterprise directly: a specific ontology can be designed better or worse, more or less costly, more or less effective depending on the developers understanding of the nature of the phenomena they are dealing with in the process. Much of ergonomics depends on natural language, especially on the meaning expressed by and in it and on the comprehension of that meaning both by the speakers and hearers. It is in the area of natural language semantics and its application, computational semantics, that the ontological approach has been particularly successful.

descendants of at least one of those general concepts and inherit their slots and fillers at least monotonously, i.e. vertically down. Thus, the process PERMIT may be represented, simplistically, as follows:
PERMIT

is-a agent beneficiary theme

directive-event human human event agent permit.beneficiary precond have-authority agent permit.agent theme OR permit.beneficiary permit.theme

2 FACETS OF ONTOLOGY 2.1 BASIC NOTION AND EXAMPLE

An ontology is understood here as a tangled hierarchy of concepts, such that each concept is a frame with a set of slots and fillers. The specific examples come from one of the largest and richest ontologies in existence, the one developed initially for the MikroKosmos knowledge-based system of machine translation (MT) and available for browsing on the Web at kbae.cerias.purdue.edu. Its top level consists of the concept ALL, which has three children, PROCESS, OBJECT, and PROPERTY the names of the concepts are, however, mere mnemonic labels for human user convenience and can be easily replaced without any changes in the ontology as long as the frames remain constant and consistent. All the other concepts in the ontology are

The concept is characterized as a DIRECTIVE EVENT, which is a descendant of MENTAL EVENT, which is, of course, ultimately a descendant of EVENT. The event has a human agent and a human beneficiary and it concerns an event involving that beneficiary as an agent: provided that the agent of PERMIT, permit.agent has the authority to allow the beneficiary to be the agent of that event (i.e. to perform a certain act) and/or the authority over that kind of act, the beneficiary of PERMIT, permit.beneficiary, is licensed to bring about the event by committing an appropriate act. Each of the slots and fillers in the concept entry is itself a concept in the ontology (and was not put in the customary small caps for easier reading). In the real ontology, PERMIT will inherit several slots and fillers (certainly, and at the very least, the agent/human and beneficiary/human slot/fillers) from its parent, DIRECTIVE-EVENT, which, in turn, will inherit (at least some of) them from its parent, COMMUNICATIVEEVENT.

2.2

FOUNDATIONAL ISSUES

IN

ONTOLOGY

2.2.1 Ontology as metaphysics The term ontology is used by some philosophers interchangeably with metaphysics (see Grossmann 1992). Metaphysics, the most ancient part of philosophy, dating back at least to Aristotle, deals with the most basic categories of

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