Techniques for Merging Upper Ontologies.

In this paper, we examine techniques used to merge the upper ontologies of the Process Specification Language (PSL) and the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) ontologies. In particular, we focus on the parts of these two ontologies relevant to the commonsense notion of participation as a relation between objects, activities, and time. We discuss the obstacles faced to formalize the relationships between these ontologies and provide an overview of the methodology undertaken to bridge the ontologies together. New ontologies are introduced to bring the PSL and DOLCE ontologies together to allow us to specify the mappings between them. We illustrate how ontology verification is used to show faithful interpretations between the two upper ontologies. We also explore applications of ontology transfer between a mathematical ontology and an upper ontology as an additional means of specifying bridges between ontologies.