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Identity, Unity, and Individuality: Towards a Formal Toolkit for Ontological Analysis

Nicola Guarino, Christopher Welty

We have identified several notions important to Ontology in Philosophy, that, with suitable formalization, have proven extremely useful tools for ontological analysis, and have become a central part of a methodology for ontology-driven conceptual analysis we are building. We present, in some detail, formalizations of two of these notions, Identity and Unity, and discuss how they combine to form an overall theory of Individuality. We conclude with a brief example of how they can be used to check the ontological consistency of taxonomies.

Keywords: Ontologies, Philosophical Foundations, Knowledge-Based Systems

Citation: Nicola Guarino, Christopher Welty: Identity, Unity, and Individuality: Towards a Formal Toolkit for Ontological Analysis. In W.Horn (ed.): ECAI2000, Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2000, pp.219-223.


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ECAI-2000 is organised by the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI) and hosted by the Humboldt University on behalf of Gesellschaft für Informatik.