In a keynote at FOIS 2024, Øystein Linnebo proposed and motivated the reassessment and reconstruction of foundational formal ontologies via the constructive approaches exploited in philosophical logic. The proposal has attracted attention due to a series of potentially positive consequences: conceptual clarity on the adopted entities and constructors, structural clarity regarding the ontology organisation, completeness of the ontology relative to the combinatorics of elements and operators, and conceptual and logical consistency of the whole system. It remains unclear how the constructive approach would work on today’s foundational ontologies, and how it can cope with the concerns that led to building such systems. To start addressing this issue, in this paper we consider three approaches on foundational ontologies like BFO, DOLCE and UFO, to investigate how these systems might be seen as contructive-like structures. This analysis is a first step towards Linnebo’s proposal, it serves to highlight aspects that require more investigation to implement the proposal, and suggests what kind of work and considerations are needed to turn today’s foundational formal ontologies into constructive-based ontological systems.

An engineering device or system is designed to retain its functioning conditions for the time it is needed. Unfortunately, failures happen and mark the state in which a device stops functioning to a satisfactory level and, thus, is considered malfunctioning. The study of malfunction and its prevention is a central topic in engineering and its analysis poses challenges relevant to applied ontology as well. In this work, we focus on the intersection between the conceptual and ontological understanding of causation and malfunction by studying existing works in these areas. Aiming to compare these approaches from a unified viewpoint, we introduce a causation-based analysis method to take on terminological and conceptual challenges. The goal is to develop a formal taxonomy of malfunctions which can also be used to compare the other approaches in the literature. Our work pays attention to real case scenarios paving the way to the ontological understanding and modeling of failures in practice. Furthermore, it helps exploiting the potentialities of failure analysis and, in particular, of root cause analysis.

Money is enigmatic. Despite extensive investigation to date, conflicting theories persist regarding its nature. Examples include views that “Money is a physical object,” “Money is an abstract concept,” and “Money is institutional status,” among others. This paper aims to unravel this mystery by engaging in an ontological discourse on the essence of money and constructing a three-layer model that comprises (i) the representation (legitimacy) layer, (ii) the role layer, and (iii) the property layer. In the representation layer, official state-issued objects such as banknotes are examined through the lens of the representation theory. In the role layer, these objects act as monetary role holders, referred to as monetary objects, by playing the monetary role which is inherently social in nature. The three fundamental properties/functions of money—serving as a unit of economic value, being exchangeable with commodities, and capable of being stored—are inherent in monetary role, and hence in monetary objects. However, these properties/functions remain latent until they are possessed by agents. The property layer elucidates that money is a contingent property of the owner of monetary objects, who can engage in economic activities by harnessing/actualizing these three properties/functions. In summary, our ontological theory of money posits Money as a property, Monetary objects holding the Monetary role, whose player is the Legitimate representing thing issued by the authority. For instance, a freshly minted 20 Euro banknote is a legitimate representing thing, transitioning into a monetary object upon holding the monetary role within the economic context. Its institutional/causal power becomes operative upon ownership by an agent. Our theory adopts a monistic perspective rather than a dualistic one, facilitated by the above nuanced distinctions made among entities pertaining to “money.” Discussion about how our theory works for resolving some of the current issues is presented together with a justification for the observation that money virtually has use value in addition to exchange value.

The notion of trust has been traditionally investigated within many disciplines, ranging from sociology to economy, as well as politics, psychology, and philosophy. More recently, it is especially in the fields of AI, ICT, and Engineering (e.g., Critical systems), that the need for a discussion on the concept of trust, problematized in relation to the massive employment of technical artefacts in modern society, is becoming urgent. Yet, being a characteristic trait of human relationships, it is not clear whether the attitude of trust can also be directed towards artefacts. Moreover, with respect to the study of systems’ failures, the engineering sciences provide cognate notions to that of trust, e.g. reliability or dependability, which highlight our dependence on complex systems to fulfil certain tasks in a context of risk, uncertainty and vulnerability. In order to understand how far we can rely on technology, we should be able to understand, first of all, which kinds of dependencies are at stake. To this aim, in this paper, we will briefly review and discuss the main theoretical points related to trust and the technical notions mentioned, looking at both humanities and engineering literature. Then, we shall propose a preliminary ontological analysis aiming at comparing the specificities of the concepts concerned, all sharing a form of instrumental dependence.

The representation of manufacturing resources plays a fundamental role in engineering modeling scenarios. These are characterized in a number of ways by taking into account their physical properties, capabilities, roles, etc. In this context, notions like capability, process, and functionality are used in different manners, hence it is not clear how different approaches can interoperate. The aim of this work is to propose an ontology for manufacturing that represents assets involved in manufacturing operations, their characteristics and relations, as defined in a list of requirements. This contribution stems from the existing literature and, in particular, integrates recent works related to the modeling of manufacturing resources, engineering functions, and capabilities. The ontology takes advantage of DOLCE as foundational ontological framework. The relevant axioms are presented and commented on with respect to the identified requirements.

We investigate the construction of time in EMMO, a foundational ontology developed to improve the strictness in the representation of applied sciences’ knowledge. We show how temporal individuals and temporal relations can be defined from the primitives of causation and parthood, at the core of EMMO; we then prove that our construction satisfies van Benthem’s requirements for temporal structures. Our analysis contributes to clarifying the overall landscape of causal relational theories of time, and to the ongoing effort of aligning foundational ontologies. We conclude by sketching how our results can be generalised, employing a strategy to simulate relations’ transitive closure in FOL. This generalisation makes the described construction of time exploitable in ontology engineering with minimal preconditions and sets up the groundwork for a systematic analysis of the connections between (discrete) causal and temporal structures.

In philosophy information is mainly discussed along with the notion of aboutness. In more practical communities, information is mainly addressed together with notions like data and knowledge. This paper proposes a different approach. We look at information (and related concepts) as roles played by representations. This view implies that the notion of representation is central for any ontological analysis of information and related concepts. The paper provides arguments for this new stand and discusses an ontological model of representation based on the systematic distinction between form and content. The broadness and flexibility of the proposed model is shown by discussing a list of variegated representation entities from music to procedure, from novel to painting. The paper also investigates the role of letters (characters) in natural language expressions, which turns out to be quite complex.

Forests, cars and orchestras are very different ontological entities, and yet very similar in some aspects. The relationships they have with the elements they are composed of is often assumed to be reducible to standard ontological relations, like parthood and constitution, but how this could be done is still debated. This paper sheds light on the issue starting from a linguistic and philosophical analysis aimed at understanding notions like plurality, collective and composite, and proposing a formal approach to characterise them. We conclude the presentation with a discussion and analysis of social groups within this framework.

Artificial agents might not understand human interests and actions if these agents cannot anticipate how a person understands a situation and, based on this, what could be his/her expectations. In many cases, understanding, expectations and behaviors are constrained, if not driven, by culture. Can we provide human culture to an artificial agent? Can we provide formal representations of different cultures? In this paper we discuss the (elusive) notion of culture and propose an approach based on the notion of trait which, we argue, allows building formal modules suitable to represent culture (broadly understood). We distinguish the trait types (knowledge, rule, behavior, interpretation) that such modules should contain and briefly discuss how they could be organized. Finally, we exemplify the role of a trait module in the flow of information internal to an agent highlighting surprising potentialities.

Cities can be seen as systems of urban artefacts interacting with human activities. Since cities in this sense need to be organized and coordinated, convergences and divergences between the "planned" and the "lived" city have always been of paramount interest in urban planning. The increasing amount of geo big data and the growing impact of Internet of Things (IoT) in contemporary smart city is pushing toward a re-conceptualization of urban systems taking into consideration the complexity of human behaviors. This work contributes to this view by proposing an ontological analysis of urban artefacts and their roles, focusing in particular on the difference between social roles and functional roles through the prism of social practices.

We introduce and formalize the key elements of a recent approach [1] to function definition that covers both biological and artefact functions. The paper concentrates on the steps from informal definitions to formal expressions and aims to show how to develop an ontological module for generic function representation. This part is done assuming the YAMATO ontology as background system. The second goal of the paper discusses how the module could be adapted to other foundational ontologies. In this part, we first point out the ontological assumptions on which the module relies and then discuss problems in reformulating them in other systems. This step is needed to verify whether and how the function module can be meaningfully used in other ontologies. We exemplify this case by discussing BFO and DOLCE, and by formalizing the module in the latter ontology.

Product structures are represented in engineering models by depicting and linking components, features and assemblies. Their understanding requires knowledge of both design and manufacturing practices, and yet further contextual reasoning is needed to read them correctly. Since these representations are essential to the engineering activities, the lack of a clear and explicit semantics of these models hampers the use of information systems for their assessment and exploitation. We study this problem by identifying different interpretations of structure representations, and then discuss the formal properties that a suitable language needs for representing components, features and combinations of these. We show that the representation of components and features require a non-standard mereology.

Feature-based product modeling is the leading approach for the integrated representation of engineering product data. On the one side, this approach has stimulated the development of formal models and vocabularies, data standards and computational ontologies. On the other side, the current ways to model features are considered problematic since it lacks a principled and uniform methodology for feature representation. This paper reviews the state of art of feature-based modeling approaches by concentrating on how features are conceptualized. It points out the drawbacks of current approaches and proposes a high-level ontology-based perspective to harmonize the definition of feature.

Mereotopology is an approach to modeling space that allows to formalize human spatial intuition without reference to points. A predominant formal theory in this area is the Regions Connection Calculus (RCC) introduced in 1992. RCC has an original fault: it relies on the notion of (Euclidean) point for the interpretation of its primitive, i.e., the connection relation C. In this paper we show that in the natural structures for mereotopology, RCC is a theory of manifolds in disguise. It follows that RCC can be reformulated without reference to any notion of point both at the syntactic and at the semantic levels.

This paper presents the mid-term outcome of the Generic Evolutionary Control Knowledge-based mOdule (Gecko) research project, i.e., a layered architecture to implement a cooperative model-based control agent for a Reconfigurable Transportation System (RTSs). A manufacturing plant is here conceived as multiple independent modules to implement alternative inbound logistic systems' configurations. To support this capability of the mechatronic hardware, an integrated solution is proposed using a knowledge-based approach to support a timeline-based planning and control module responsible for managing both the node regular activities and reconfiguration activities. A cooperation layer dedicated to multi-module coordination completes the overall architecture.

Upper ontologies are sophisticated systems that require an expressive language to be properly formalized and correctly implemented. This paper provides a formal study of one of these ontologies, called YAMATO, by providing an axiomatization in first-order logic of part of the main system. YAMATO, which has been available in OWL for some years and is used in research projects as well as in applications, is quite rich in terms of categories and relations. The system is also interesting from its ontological perspective as it presents a different combination of ontological choices with respects to todays popular upper ontologies. Here we isolate a fairly compact fragment of this system that covers important categories, such as Process and Role, and relations, such as Enacting and CausallyContributing. The axiomatization is a first step towards the full exploitation of YAMATO in information and computational systems.

We show that logic has more to offer to ontologists than standard first order and modal operators. We first describe some operators of linear logic which we believe are particularly suitable for ontological modeling, and suggest how to interpret them within an ontological framework. After showing how they can coexist with those of classical logic, we analyze three notions of artifact from the literature to conclude that these linear operators allow for reducing the ontological commitment needed for their formalization, and even simplify their logical formulation.

In the context of business process modelling, the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a de-facto standard with more than 70 commercial tools that currently support its use. Amongst its main modelling constructs, BPMN includes activities and events. However, the focus of the standard is on providing an intuitive graphical language, rather than formal semantics specifications. This results in semantic ambiguities regarding the interpretation of its modelling constructs. We investigate whether the main building blocks of BPMN commit to an ontological theory of the domain entities at hand, eventually clarifying this commitment by the approach of ontological analysis.

Both natural objects and artifacts have been studied from a variety of perspectives by the different sciences. One issue that has so far resisted philosophical and ontological investigations is the definition of a general notion of function capable of making sense of the functions attributed to natural objects, such as biological organisms, as well as of the functions attributed to artifacts, such as (designed) tools.

The purpose of this paper is to examine different modelling strategies available in a multiplicative formal ontology, and the principles that drive their choice. This study is based on the results of recent work aiming at extending the foundational ontology DOLCE to grasp two quite different notions, that of artefact and that of role. These results, summarized in the paper, show that two multiplicative modelling strategies, entity stacking and property reification, are essential in both cases.