The OntoClean Ontology

This ontology supports the development of Protégé ontologies using the OntoClean methodology (PDF). This methodology for ontological analysis was developed by N. Guarino and C. Welty. The OntoClean methodology applies the notions used for ontological analysis in philosophy to analyzing conceptual modeling in information systems. If you include this Protégé ontology in your ontology, you can annotate your classes with meta-properties of identity, unity, essence, and dependence. The OntoClean ontology in Protégé also contains constraints in the Protégé Axiom Language (PAL) enabling you to verify whether the ontology is "clean"---does not violate any of the constraints based on these properties.

The ontology contains the following definitions:

• The "OntoClean property" metaclass, defining the meta-properties
• A set of PAL constraints attached to this metaclass
• The taxonomy of properties, such as Sortal, Type, Quasi-type, etc., with the appropriate values of the metaproperties set as template-slot values (Thanks to Bill Andersen for suggesting this extension)
  

To use the OntoClean Protégé ontology to verify your ontology, you need to do the following:

• Make sure you have installed the PAL Constraints tab
  
• Include the OntoClean ontology in your project
• Change the metaclass of your top-level classes and their subclasses to "OntoClean property." If you know that your class is a type, a quasi-type, a phased sortal, etc., you can change its metaclass to any of these more specific subclasses of "OntoClean property." Then some of the values for metaproperties will be set automatically.
• Set appropriate values for meta-properties for your classes
• Use the PAL Constraints tab to verify your constraints
• Add all constraints to the list (use this button: )
• Select the constraints you want to verify
  
• Click "Evaluate selected constraints"
• Select a constraint that has violations (the selection bar doesn't actually appear in the table, but the line is selected; it's a PAL bug). Violating classes will be on the right-hand side. You can view and correct  them directly from the tab.

These screenshots show the results of evaluating the constraints (and the classes that violate the last constraint)  for the example from the following paper:
C. Welty, N. Guarino"Supporting ontological analysis of taxonomic relationships", Data and Knowledge Engineering vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 51-74, 2001 (PDF). This example is also described in this  tutorial.

The download file contains the OntoClean Protégé project and the example above. More specifically, the distribution contains the following projects:

1. The OntoClean project itself
2. An example project with the hierarchy that contains many of constraint violations
3. The "cleaned" hierarchy from the example above

Download (standard text files verison)

Download (OWL version)