General Formal Ontology

The General Formal Ontology (GFO) has been first introduced in herre2. A lot of work is going on and several modification and amendments have been made since the first version of the General Formal Ontology appeared. The most recent version and the one used in this work will be herre4, although some parts of this thesis are based on herre5, an older and unofficial version of GOL.

GFO is the ontology of GOL, the General Ontological Language from the same research group in Leipzig. The purpose of the ongoing effort is to create a formal framework that can be used to create domain-specific ontologies. The foundation of this will be a set of top-level ontologies, that can be used in this framework.

Since this work is supposed to be more theoretical in nature, we will focus on the set of top-level ontologies used in GOL, the General Formal Ontology. GFO defines a set of categories, that remain unaltered in every ontology of GFO. However, one can choose between different axiom-systems.