Ontology Design through Modular Repositories

Many real world problems require a language at least as expressive as first order logic, yet there exist many barriers to the generation of first-order ontologies. One of the biggest hurdles is the specification of axioms that capture the intended semantics of a users concepts. This paper presents an ontology design algorithm enabled by modular ontology repositories that consist of theories organized into disjoint hierarchies, each of which is a set of nonconservative extensions. The ontology design algorithm provides axiomatizations of relations by eliciting intended models from the users, identifying the strongest theories in the repository that are satisfied by the intended models, and incorporating user feedback to verify the proposed set of axioms. This approach emphasizes the communication of semantics rather than syntax, allowing users to express intuitions about their domains without extensive background in the intricacies of formal languages.