ONSET, the foundational ontology selection tool, assists the domain ontology developer in selecting the most appropriate foundational ontology. The domain ontology developer provides the requirements/answers one or more questions, and ONSET computes the selection of the appropriate foundational ontology and explains why.
The current version (v1.1) includes DOLCE, BFO, and GFO.

Download ONSET (jar file)
Using ONSET
Links to foundational ontologies
ONSET developers

Using ONSET

• There are no installation requirements. Download the ONSET jar file and double-click the file to launch the application.
Launching the application will bring you to the start screen:

Here you can select whether you want to include 'additional' questions, which have the same answers for the curently included ontologies and, optionally, indicate wiht the "Scaling catergories" whether certain parameters are more important to you than others.

Afterward, you will arrive at a tabbed pane. Each tab contains the questions for that category, and there is a results tab. Here is the top-half of the one for ontological commitments:

As can be seen, some questions have an "Explain" button, which provides additional information and, where applicable, some examples.

At the bottom of each tab is a submit button:

Pressing the button also brings you to another tab. At any time, you can go to the "Submit" tab and let ONSET compute the result.

Here is the result when having selected the answers particulars/individuals, descriptive, reductionist, possibilism, situations&situoids, OWL DL, Modularity-Yes and availablity of lighter/more expressive versions, OBO foundry-No, subject domain-Agricultural, and schema-based database integration and Semantic Web. First, the suggested foundational ontology together with the motivation why it was selected:

However, there are conflicting answers:

Finally, based on the subject domain selected, a few references are provided to literature describing ontologies in the selected subject domain:

Links to foundational ontologies

The foundational ontologies that can be selected in the current version each come in different formats/formalisations. This list contains the links to the files as provided by the BFO, DOLCE, and GFO developers.

• BFO: Basic Formal Ontology (homepage):
  • The OWL version
  • A version in first order logic in Isabelle syntax (for the isabelle theorem prover tool)
  • The OBO version
• DOLCE: Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (homepage):
  • The paper-based formalisation in first order logic in WonderWeb Deliverable D18
  • An OWL-ized version of the paper-based DOLCE, called DOLCE-lite is included as a separate file in the DLP 3971 (zip file)
  • The extended DOLCE Lite Plus (DOLCE-lite with, among others descriptions and plans, spatial relations, and more) can also be loaded as an online OWL file
• GFO: General Formal Ontology (homepage):
  • GFO full in OWL, which is an extensive version of GFO
  • GFO basic in OWL, which is a smaller core of the GFO full
    
    

Developers

The ONSET application was developed by Zubeida Khan as part of her BSc(honours) thesis in Computer Science at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, supervised by Maria Keet.

The values for the parameters have been verified by the BFO, DOLCE, and GFO developers, and we wish to thank Pierre Grenon, Stefano Borgo, Claudio Masolo, Frank Loebe and Heinrich Herre for their input.