Toward principles for the representation of hierarchical knowledge in formal ontologies

摘要

Early ontological engineering methodologies have necessarily focussed on the management of the whole ontology development process. There is a corresponding need to provide advice to the ontological engineer on the finer details of ontology construction. Here, we specifically address the representation of hierarchical relationships in an ontology. We identify five types of problem that may be encountered in moving from an informal description of a domain to a formal representation of hierarchical knowledge. Each problem type is discussed from the perspective of knowledge sharing and examples from biological ontologies are used to illustrate each type.