SSP Group Meeting

11am, 8 April, 2003
Room 3.04, Appleton Tower
CISA, School of Informatics
University of Edinburgh

The Information Flow Framework

Marco Schorlemmer

The Information Flow Framework (IFF) provides the terminology, semantics and principled foundation for a metalevel ontological framework - a framework for sharing ontologies, manipulating ontologies as objects, relating ontologies through morphisms, partitioning ontologies,composing ontologies via colimits, discussing ontological structure, noting dependencies between ontologies, declaring the use of other ontologies, etc.

The IFF is currently being developed by Robert Kent as part of the effort carried out by the IEEE Standard Upper Ontology (SUO) working group, whose aim is to define a standard "[specifying] an upper ontology that will enable computers to utilize it for applications such as data interoperability, information search and retrieval, automated inferencing, and natural language processing." The IFF aims at providing an ontological framework for the SUO, and in this talk I will be giving a general overview of this framework.