Affiliations: Department of Evolutionary Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany | Research Group Ontologies in Medicine (Onto-Med), Institute of Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology (IMISE), University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany | Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany | Graduate Program Knowledge Representation, Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany | University of Trento, Trento, Italy
Abstract: The rapid increase in the number and use of biological ontologies necessitates developing systems for their integration. In this paper we present a core ontology for biology, and outline its application for integrating biological domain ontologies. Our ontology rests on a foundational ontology, which offers higher-order categories and a theory of levels of reality. The core ontology is implemented in two separate components, each of which adheres to OWL-DL. These can be used independently with efficient DL reasoners, but they will be most effective when used together, which necessitates working with an OWL-Full ontology. The ontology is freely available from our website at: http://bioonto.de/pmwiki.php/Main/GFO-Bio.
Keywords: Core ontology, biomedical ontology, categories, levels of reality, ontology integration, default knowledge, General Formal Ontology
