Formal ontology

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In philosophy, the term formal ontology is used to refer to an ontology defined by axioms in a formal language with the goal to provide an unbiased (domain- and application-independent) view on reality, which can help the modeler of domain- or application-specific ontologies to avoid possibly erroneous ontological assumptions encountered in modeling large-scale ontologies.

By maintaining an independent view on reality, a formal (upper level) ontology gains the following properties:

• indefinite expandability:

  the ontology remains consistent with increasing content.

• content and context independence:

  any kind of 'concept' can find its place.

• accommodate different levels of granularity.