Unintended consequences of class-based ontological commitment

Abstract

Domain ontologies can promote shared understanding of a domain using standardized constructs to represent domain semantics. Building upon this promise, libraries of domain-specific ontologies have been created. However, we argue that adopting any particular domain ontology can in fact hinder domain understanding and reduce the quality of data made available through a shared ontology. This paper examines unintended consequences of class-based ontological commitment and advocates instead an instance-and-property ontological foundation. The proposed approach can better inform the practice of information sharing and can, in participative domains, enable users to contribute higher quality information with fewer constraints. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.