BFO as a top-level ontology for information systems modeling

Top-level ontologies are essential for developing domain ontologies underlying intelligent information systems by providing modeling patterns for entities of all kinds. Top-level ontologies can reduce ambiguity and context issues related to the language employed to create knowledge units suitable to knowledge representation systems. Despite its widespread use and importance, information systems and information science researchers and professionals as well, need to learn how to take advantage of top-level ontologies, like the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). This tutorial explores the essentials of BFO, its entities and relationships in two modules. The first module approaches BFO’s branches traversing top-level entities and revealing the two persistence theories it includes. The second module advances in implementing an ontology example, importing BFO and constructing a small domain ontology downwards. The tutorial is aimed at everyone that wants to learn how to start developing suitable ontologies and incrementing data quality.