Aristotelian Ontologies and OWL Modeling

Abstract

This chapter shows how the Aristotelian or epistemological approach to ontologies can be understood in the framework of recent domain ontology modeling languages like the Web ontology language (OWL). After a short introduction to the specific properties of the Aristotelian approach to ontological modelling, we discuss one detailed example of a reformulation of such an ontology with OWL. In the final discussion, we give some indications concerning the differences in applying an epistemological vs. a more common object oriented approach to domain knowledge engineering in practice.