Attribute meta-properties for knowledge sharing

Formal ontological analysis is a methodology that builds on some philosophical notions in order to guide the process of building ontologies whose structure is correct and little or no tangled. This paper presents an ontology model that facilitates formal ontological analysis, by providing a set of metaproperties which characterise the behaviour of concept properties in a concept definition, while providing a richer semantics of the concept. We describe concepts in terms of their attributes (characterising features) and we also describe the role played by these features in the concept definition, whether they are prototypical or exceptional, whether they are permitted to change over time, and if so, how often this happens, how likely is a concept to show these features, etc. We show that these metaproperties can support a methodology, OntoClean [44] that uses formal ontological analysis to build cleaner taxonomies (which are thus more sharable). The set of metaproperties for attributes we propose can be used to guide in determining which metaproperties for concepts hold for an ontology and therefore can support the use On-