Use of Upper Ontologies for Interoperation of Information Systems: A Tutorial

data types Data structures generally have collection of operations or functions associated with them. An abstract data type is a data structure together with its collection of associated operations and functions. This is a familiar concept: 1. the integers support equality together with arithmetical operations including division with remainder and binary relational predicates; 2. reals, in their computer incarnation as floating point numbers, support unqualified division (except by 0) but not equality; 3. sets support union, intersection, difference, membership test, add and delete member, and so on; 4. the subtype relation supports navigation between subtype and supertype, including a transitive closure operation; 5. the part-whole relationship supports the mereological operations and predicates, including mereological sum and transitive closure of parthood. 15 See Mereology in Explanations