Table 1 A selection of conflicts that may emerge during ontology authoring, as a preliminary library of conflicts
From: Toward a systematic conflict resolution framework for ontologies
No. | Conflict | Description | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
Conflicting theories at the top-level | |||
1 | foundational | ontologies adhere to conflicting theories | BFO, DOLCE, GFO, SUMO, UFO, YAMATO (see Table 2 for details) |
2 | mereological | conflicting mereological theories | with Atom or not, weak vs. strong supplementation |
3 | topological | conflicting topological theories | region connection calculus on non-simply connected regions |
4 | building blocks | different ontological commitments embedded in the language | whether roles are part of the fundamental furniture of the universe, 3D + time vs. 4D ‘worms’ |
Conflicting theories at the subject domain level | |||
5 | domain theory | theories with competing views of the whole domain | Newtonian physics vs. relativistic mechanics |
6 | status of an element | theories with competing views about a specific entity | whether virus is a living thing or not |
Axiom-level conflicts | |||
7 | ontological | conflicting theories acting out on the axiom-level | pinpointing the violating axiom in items 1–3, 5, or 6, e.g., whether parthood is antisymmetric or not |
8 | within-language family | violation of a language profile beyond decidability | some of the non-admissible axiom combinations as listed in the first item of Example 4 |
violation of a language profile, yet remaining decidable | functional and transitive properties in OWL 2 QL | ||
Other conflicts | |||
9 | modeling style | applied vs. foundational | whether there are data property axioms, alike height between Person and xsd:decimal |
class vs. object property | Infection vs. infected-by | ||
subsuming roles vs. roles inhering in objects | doctor is-a person vs. doctor inheres-in person | ||
10 | language | cultural-linguistic and labeling differences, such as preferred/alt labels, orthography, language variants | population immunity vs herd immunity, eraser vs rubber, color vs colour, and non-1:1 mappings where a concept is named in one language but not in another (e.g., ‘river’ vs fleuve and rivière) |