John,
Antifoundational
stances in philosophy are not intuitve to many of us at first exposure,
but
perhaps the analogy to Euclidean geometr and the parallel axiom provides an
overly simple
bridge
to see alternative foundations that provide useful theorems in different
contexts
Or
perhaps we need to adapt the antifoundational slogan of "having to build our
boats while at sea" to
the
ontological endeavor.
In
response to your point:
JS>One of my
criticisms of any ontology that has a fixed
upper level, such as
DOLCE and many others (including
the one I presented
in my KR book), is that there is only *one* upper level.
The DOLCE design patterns have been designed
to propagate design decisions
JS>made for the
DOLCE upper level to every level of the ontology from top to
bottom.
Yes,
but DOLCE is the first module of the
WonderWeb Foundational Ontologies Library
(WFOL).which,
as I understand it from Guarino?s briefings, has no single upper
level.
Instead it has a ?small? set
of foundational ontologies that have been ?carefully?
justified and
positioned with respect to a space of alternative, possible
choices.
The
approach is to clearly documented options using clear branching points
basic
to allow exploration and easy comparison of alternative ontological
options. That
seems to be a practical strategy for not getting
caught in one upper level as a first step.
Gary
Berg-Cross