Mapping and Verification of the Time Ontology in SUMO

Abstract

Many software systems rely on ontologies for semantic interoperation. However, ontologies which admit unintended models might cause misunderstandings that hinder interoperability because their vocabularies are ambiguously defined. Foundational ontologies, such as SUMO, provide rich characterizations for general concepts that underly every knowledge representation enterprise. Those ontologies are intended to be broadly reused as a reference for semantics. Ontology verification is the process by which a theory is checked to rule out unintended models by means of further axiomatization, and characterize missing intended ones. In this paper, we verify the subtheory of core temporal concepts of the SUMO foundational ontology and relate its axiomatization via ontology mapping with other time ontologies, the foundational ontology DOLCE, and the generic ontology PSL. As a result, we propose the addition of some missing axioms that we have identified during our verification task, and the correction of others.