In this paper, I discuss the applicability of Quine’s idea of ontological commitment to the realm of applied ontology. In particular, I put forward a certain extension of this notion, which, in my view, provides a more informative insight into how a given applied ontology represents the existential aspect of its intended domain. The theoretical considerations are illustrated with a case study, where I describe the ontological commitments of the DOLCE ontology.

Large language models are capable of translating natural language texts into context-free grammar languages. The paper presents an initial assessment of whether such models can be used to produce ontological theories that formalise natural language descriptions of certain situations. More specifically speaking, I will focus on translating a small set of natural language descriptions of some situations of ontological interests into a fixed formal ontological framework. The model I use will not be trained or fine-tuned for this purpose but prompted. In order to build the appropriate prompts I will take advantage of the formalisations from the 17th volume of the Applied Ontology journal, where six examples of such situations were formalised within the context of seven upper-level formal ontologies.

The notion of identity criteria marked the dawn of contemporary formal ontology. Despite a number of issues this notion has raised, the quest for them still seems to be worthwhile, in particular in the case of a formal ontology built in the context of information systems. In the current paper I investigate the benefits and costs of using automatic theorem provers in the task of identifying such criteria for formal ontologies that are expressed in a prover-processable language. To this end two detailed case studies were performed – each concerned an upper-level ontology presented in a recent volume of the Applied Ontology journal. The identity criteria found by the process described in this paper turned out to be not particularly illuminating. The respective theorems that define them are rather direct consequences of the axioms, so proofs and models provided by the prover do not provide any new insights into the actual conceptual contents of the formal ontologies.

Collaborative development of a shared or standardized ontology presents unique issues in workflow, version control, testing, and quality control. These challenges are similar to challenges faced in large-scale collaborative software development. We have taken this idea as the basis of a collaborative ontology development platform based on familiar software tools, including Continuous Integration platforms, version control systems, testing platforms, and review workflows. We have implemented these using open-source versions of each of these tools, and packaged them into a full-service collaborative platform for collaborative ontology development. This platform has been used in the development of FIBO, the Financial Industry Business Ontology, an ongoing collaborative effort that has been developing and maintaining a set of ontologies for over a decade. The platform is open-source and is being used in other projects beyond FIBO. We hope to continue this trend and improve the state of practice of collaborative ontology design in many more industries.

The paper outlines a conceptual framework to identify all ontological and logical aspects relevant for the debate over structural universals. The framework allows for a multi-facetted classifications of various accounts of the latter and facilitates their comparison in a systematic way. To show the framework in action I use it to classify all major theoretical positions in this debate.

The paper provides a tentative formulation of the diachronic identity criteria for localities based on a set of paradigmatic case studies of changes they may undergo.

The paper outlines a formal ontology of texts. The main ontological distinction I try to capture is the difference between tokens of texts (physical texts) and texts (abstract texts) themselves. The latter are understood here as ontologically dependent on the former in the sense spelled out by the axioms of the ontology. I formally characterise both types by means of their criteria of identity and existence, parthood, spatial occupancy, text precedence, and intentionality.

The paper defines three logical criteria for semantic adequacy of an applied ontology. All criteria are based on the idea to the effect that when an ontology construed as a formal theory allows for swapping some items in its vocabulary, then it does not sufficiently differentiate between the meanings of these items and, consequently, the semantic aspect of this vocabulary cannot be claimed to be sufficiently characterised. Besides providing the formal definitions of those criteria and proving some simple correlations therebetween I present the empirical results of their implementation.

The paper presents preliminary results in the area of ontological engineering for historical research. Historical information systems are still in the initial stage of development. Our experience hitherto shows that the decisive stage in the development of such systems is a conceptual model and ontological engineering seems to be the right tool to build it. Our particular aim is to develop a database system for the history of the administrative structure of the Catholic Church in Central-Eastern Europe in the so-called pre-statical period, i.e. roughly from XII to XIX century. We use DOLCE as a foundational ontology, especially its part concerning social objects. We build an axiomatic system that formally defines the basic notions of those structures and may be interpreted as the conceptual scheme of this database.