An important goal of OntoSpace is the development of a cognitively-based, commonsense ontology for space. The spatial ontology will be used both for exploring theoretical questions relevant to spatial cognition and for providing ontological support for other projects within the SFB/TR 8. As the basis for a spatial ontology, OntoSpace recommends DOLCE, and, as such, has also fostered international cooperation with the Laboratory for Applied Ontology in Italy. This cooperation is being conducted jointly with I4-[SPIN], one task of which is to pursue the representation and formalization of ontologies.

As an example of ontological support, the spatial ontology is being used to integrate various spatial calculi used in other SFG/TR8 projects. Of note is the incorporation of the Route Graph (part of I3-[SharC]) into the ontology as a way to capture a robot's view of navigable space.

Linguistic Ontology

A key component of OntoSpace is a linguistically motivated ontology that we will continue to develop over the life of the project. A linguistic ontology is an account of the world, a conceptualization of the categories and relations, motivated according to linguistic semantic criteria. The elements of a linguistic ontology are necessarily contained in cognitively motivated ontologies, as language is a fundamental part of cognition. A linguistic ontology can be constructed on the same formal level as an ontology motivated by realist or general cognitive principles. The elements of a linguistic ontology do not, however, represent entities in the real world or general language-neutral concepts. A linguistic ontology is an account of how the grammar and/or semantics of a particular natural language carves up the world. The linguistic ontology of OntoSpace is based on theoretical and empirical linguistic research of English and German; such empirical investigations are also carried out in I5-[DiaSpace].

The current version of the linguistic ontology, the Generalized Upper Model, and its spatial extension are specified in OWL-DL and CASL, see also an overview of different GUM versions. We recommend viewing the ontology in the latest version of Protégé. Analyzed utterances of corpora samples given by instantiations of GUM ensure a deep coverage of complex spatial language. The linguistic ontology is based on the Generalized Upper Model (GUM-2.0) and has been transformed from the original Loom document. We provide an owl2loom.xslt utility for converting from OWL-DL to LOOM (you may have to "view page source" to see the xslt file).

OntoSpace plays a major role in the Bremen Ontology Research Group. And for more information regarding ontologies, see the ontology portal page.