BFO Classifier: Aligning domain ontologies to BFO

Abstract

Foundational ontologies are known to have a steep learning curve, which hampers casual use by domain ontology developers to use them for domain ontology development. Foundational ontology developers have not provided methods or tools to lower the barriers of uptake beyond offering, at best, a computational version. We investigate an approach to bridge this gap through the development of a decision diagram for BFO, which offers the modeller a series of questions with closed answer options in order to step-wise arrive at a suitable entity to align the domain entity to. This diagram was implemented in a tool, the BFO Classifier, that keeps track of the question and answer trace and with the click of a button the alignment axiom can be added to the ontology. It was evaluated with two BFO-aligned ontologies, which showed that in at least half.