The Ontology for Conceptual Characterization of Ontologies

Ontologies as computational artifacts have been seen as a solution to FAIRness due to their characteristics, applications, and semantic competencies. Conceptualizations of complex and vast domains can be fragmented in different ways and can compose what is known as ontology networks. Thus, the ontologies produced can relate to each other in many different ways, making the ontological artifacts themselves subject to FAIRness. The problem is that in the Ontology Engineering Process, stakeholders take different perspectives of the conceptualizations, and this causes ontologies to have biases that are sometimes more ontological and sometimes more related to the domain. Besides, usually, Ontology Engineers provide well-grounded reference ontologies, but rarely are they implemented. At the same time, Domain Specialists produce operational ontologies storing large amounts of valid data but with naive ontological support or even without any. We address this problem of lack of consensual conceptualization by proposing a reference conceptual model (O4OA) that considers ontological-related and domain-related perspectives, knowledge, and commitment necessary to facilitate the process of Ontological Analysis, including the analysis of ontologies composing an ontology network. Indeed, O4OA is a (meta)ontology grounded in the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) and supported by well-known ontological classification standards, guides, and FAIR principles. We demonstrate how this approach can suitably promote conceptual clarification and terminological harmonization in this area through our framework proposal and its case studies.