Evaluating Ontological Decisions with ontoclean

The process of building ontologies for use in information systems remains an arcane art form, which mustbecome a rigorous engineering discipline. One of the requirements for developing a true ontology engineering practice is a general, domain-independent methodology that provides guidance not only on what kinds of ontological decisions need to be made, buyt on how these decisions can be evaluated. The OntoClean methodology seeks to provide this kind of guidance based on highly general ontological notions drawn from philosophical ontology, especially what is now called "analytic metaphysics." Among other things, we use our methodology to validate taxonomies by exposing inappropriate and inconsistent modeling choices.