Inferring Ontological Categories of OWL Classes Using Foundational Rules

Several efforts that leverage the tools of formal ontology have demonstrated the fruitfulness of considering key metaproperties of classes in ontology engineering. Despite that, it is still a common practice to apply representation schemes and approaches-such as OWL-that do not benefit from identifying ontological categories and simply treat all classes in the same manner. In the original study, we proposed an approach to support the automated classification of classes into the ontological categories underlying the (g)UFO foundational ontology. We proposed a set of inference rules derived from (g)UFO's axiomatization that, given an initial classification of the classes in an OWL ontology, supports the inference of the classification for the remaining classes in the ontology. We formalized these rules, implemented them in a tool, and assessed them against a catalog of ontologies.