AGAINST IDIOSYNCRASY IN ONTOLOGY DEVELOPMENT
Barry Smith
International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2006)
Baltimore, Maryland (USA), November 9-11, 2006
Abstract
The world of ontology development is full of mysteries. Recently, ISO Standard 15926 (“Lifecycle Integration of Process Plant Data Including Oil and Gas Production Facilities”), a data model initially designed to support the integration and handover of large engineering artefacts, has been proposed by its principal custodian for general use as an upper-level ontology. As we shall discover,ISO 15926 is, when examined in light of this proposal, marked by a series of quite astonishing defects, which can however provide general lessons for the developers of ontologies in the future.