Ontologia delle relazioni, teoria dei ruoli onto-tematici e ontologia dell'organizzazione aziendale della Halley Informatica

This work provides the analysis of several solutions to the problem of relational order and employs the core ideas of one of this solutions, namely the theory of ontological thematic roles, to develop two different ontologies: the first one concerns the structural organization of the company Halley Informatics; the domain of the second ontology is the home. The term ontology used here can be viewed as an explicit formal representation of all the terms in a specific domain, all the properties of the terms, the relations among them and the formal axioms used to describe the domain. The aim of this project is to clarify the notion of ontology used in computer sciences, referring to the ontological study of being and existence from a philosophical standpoint, and to provide two examples of ontologies that can be easily reused, and integrated. It also contribute to the formulation of a list of thematic roles used in linguistics, and to improve the lexical database FrameNet. I provided a clear definition of ontology in computer science; then I built the two ontologies using the ontology editor Protégé. This editor is easy to use, and it is useful because it provide an immediate graph of the ontology. Concerning the ontology developed for the company Halley Informatica, the definitions of terms that constitute this domain are based on documents edited by the company; in the case of the ontology of the home, I used the definitions of terms occurred in FrameNet, a lexical database of English terms. This database is both human and machine readable. I propose to add new terms in FrameNet, and to use the onto-thematic roles theory instead of the semantic frames theory in some cases, i.e. ‘to sell’ and ‘to buy’, because it points out more clearly the similarity of terms. The original aspect of this work is the study of the relations among elements that constitute respectively the domain of the Halley, and the domain of the home. This study is based on the onto-thematic role theory, according to which onto-thematic roles are the ontological counterparts of thematic roles used in linguistics. Thus, we have thematic roles at a sematic level, whereas onto-thematic roles at an ontological level. I provide a list of thematic roles, that are divided in primitive thematic roles, secondary thematic roles. I also gave some examples of their possible use, and a list of onto-thematic roles. The list of onto-thematic roles is based on the assumptions that I formulated for the thematic roles. Furthermore, I considered the new onto-thematic roles introduced by Francesco Orilia in his works on this issue.