INFS3101/7100 Ontology and the Semantic Web

Exercises from Week 6

For discussion in tutorial week 7

Key concepts from lecture: BWW and Dolce are formal upper ontologies. Include systems, endurants, perdurants, subclasses, etc. Formal upper ontologies provide a rich meta vocabulary to help develop ontologies and suggest abstract data types which can be supported by ontology servers to make it easier to build rich ontologies.

1.     (relevant to point 9 of the assignment) Consider the rental accommodation exchange from the week 2 tutorial and the representation in the solution to the week 4 tutorial and following.

a.     Describe examples of systems, subsystems, and environments of systems in the ontology. Find some coupled objects in the ontology. Identify hereditary and emergent properties of the systems. Make plausible additions to the system if necessary.

b.     Describe endurants and perdurants in the ontology. What endurants participate in the perdurants? How are the histories of the endurants represented in the ontology?

c.      Think of an improvement in the ontology suggested by some aspect of the BWW/Dolce formal upper ontologies. Show how the improvement follows from the upper ontologies.