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.