Towards a consistent logical framework for ontological analysis

Abstract

In their framework for ontological analysis, Guarino and Welty provide a number of insights that are useful for guiding the design of taxonomic hierarchies. However, the formal statements of these insights as logical schemata are flawed in a number of ways, including inconsistent notation that makes the intended semantics of the logic unclear, false claims of logical consequence, and definitions that provably result in the triviality of some of their property features. This paper makes a negative contribution, by demonstrating these flaws in a rigorous way, but also makes a positive contribution wherever possible, by identifying the underlying intuitions that the faulty definitions were intended to capture, and attempting to formalize those intuitions in a more accurate way.