On the Formal Alignment of Foundational Ontologies: Building Mappings Between Basic Formal Ontology and Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering

The development of an ontology-based ecosystem suitable for interoperability and for the reliable exchange of data and information is a longstanding goal of the applied ontology community. The construction of such a system relies on the alignment of a variety of ontologies. The alignment can be vertical, that is, across systems in different ontological layers (foundational, reference and domain) or horizontal, that is, across systems within a single layer. While techniques for vertical and horizontal alignments among reference and domain ontologies have been continuously studied for more than 15 years; the development of techniques for the alignment of foundational ontologies and across foundational and reference ontologies has been scattered or hardly addressed. This paper aims to bring attention to this latter problem in several ways: Highlighting the motivations for the alignment across foundational ontologies; presenting a methodology to develop such alignments; implementing the methodology to the case of the ontologies Basic Formal Ontology and Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering; and showing how an alignment deepens our understanding of such systems. The paper discusses also some alternative types of alignments, and briefly compares advantages and difficulties.