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The Universal Ontology: A Vision for Conceptual Modeling and the Semantic Web (Invited Paper)

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Book cover Conceptual Modeling (ER 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10650))

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Abstract

This paper puts forward a vision of a universal ontology (UO) aiming at solving, or at least greatly alleviating, the semantic integration problem in the field of conceptual modeling and the understandability problem in the field of the semantic web. So far it has been assumed that the UO is not feasible in practice, but we think that it is time to revisit that assumption in the light of the current state-of-the-art. This paper aims to be a step in this direction. We try to make an initial proposal of a feasible UO. We present the scope of the UO, the kinds of its concepts, and the elements that could comprise the specification of each concept. We propose a modular structure for the UO consisting of four levels. We argue that the UO needs a complete set of concept composition operators, and we sketch three of them. We also tackle a few issues related to the feasibility of the UO, which we think that they could be surmountable. Finally, we discuss the desirability of the UO, and we explain why we conjecture that there are already organizations that have the knowledge and resources needed to develop it, and that might have an interest in its development in the near future.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the context of this paper, we will consider ontologies and conceptual schemas as synonymous.

  2. 2.

    http://schema.org/.

  3. 3.

    http://www.oed.com/.

  4. 4.

    https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/knowledge_sources/metathesaurus/release/statistics.html.

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Acknowledgments

The author is greatly indebted to his colleagues Albert Abelló, Jordi Cabot, Ernest Teniente, and Toni Urpí for their comments to earlier drafts of this paper. This work has been partially supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, under project TIN2014-52938-C2-2-R.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Service and Information System Engineering, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – Barcelona Tech, Barcelona, Catalonia

    Antoni Olivé

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  1. Antoni Olivé
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria

    Heinrich C. Mayr

  2. Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

    Giancarlo Guizzardi

  3. Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Hui Ma

  4. Valencia University of Technology, Valencia, Spain

    Oscar Pastor

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Olivé, A. (2017). The Universal Ontology: A Vision for Conceptual Modeling and the Semantic Web (Invited Paper). In: Mayr, H., Guizzardi, G., Ma, H., Pastor, O. (eds) Conceptual Modeling. ER 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10650. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69904-2_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69904-2_1

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