Metaphysical Choices

Major metaphysical meta-ontological choices, whether made consciously nor not, influence the overall shape of an ontological architecture. This brief note argues that the development of upper ontologies should include a characterisation of their architecture in terms of these choices and their impact. How this might work is illustrated here with examples of two major choices, these are: Perdurantism versus Endurantism and Presentism versus Eternalism.

An overview of BORO Foundational Ontology’s Meta-ontological Choices. This covers:
- Background - BORO as an extensional ontology for business systems
- The context for metaphysical choices
- How does philosophy characterise the different metaphysics? Metaphysics through the eyes of philosophy textbooks
- BORO’s metaphysical choices
- Top level patterns - that emerge as a result of the choices
- Re-engineering the companies house data - an example of the re-engineering process assocaited with the choices
- Company - an example of the result of the choices
- Higher order types - one of BORO's metaphysical choices

The Centre for Digital Built Britain has been tasked through the Digital Framework Task Group to develop an Information Management Framework (IMF) to support the development of a National Digital Twin (NDT) as set out in “The Pathway to an Information Management Framework” (Hetherington, 2020). A key component of the IMF is a Foundation Data Model (FDM), built upon a top-level ontology (TLO), as a basis for ensuring consistent data across the NDT.

This document captures the results collected from a broad survey of top-level ontologies, conducted by the IMF technical team. It focuses on the core ontological choices made in their foundations and the pragmatic engineering consequences these have on how the ontologies can be applied and further scaled. This document will provide the basis for discussions on a suitable TLO for the FDM. It is also expected that these top-level ontologies will provide a resource whose components can be harvested and adapted for inclusion in the FDM.

Following the publication of this document, the programme will perform a structured assessment of the TLOs identified herein, with a view to selecting one or more TLOs that will form the kernel around which the FDM will evolve. A further report – The FDM TLO Selection Paper – will be issued to describe this process in late 2020.

This is, in essence, the project initiation paper for the CEO Project. Its main concern is explaining the project’s aims, how it intends to achieve them and the methodological framework within which the project will work. It explains the origins, conception and motivation for the project and gives an outline of the management framework for the project, in particular the first synthesis stage. It clarifies the terms of the art and describes the nature of ontological analysis. It also characterises the requirements that shape it and the meta-ontological choices and analytic styles that underlie it. Finally, it describes the potential applications and the next steps

This tutorial should, hopefully, help you to explain what an ontology is and how it can be useful; identify several common misunderstandings when using attempting to ‘do’ ontology; see why a top ontology is useful; and appreciate its technical nature; and become acquainted with one example top ontology – BORO. It is intended to help you understand ontology, it is not intended to turn you into an ontologist.