The Information Flow Foundation for Conceptual Knowledge Organization

Abstract: The sharing of ontologies between diverse communities of discourse allows them to compare their own information structures with that of other communities that share a common terminology and semantics - ontology sharing facilitates interoperability between online knowledge organizations. This paper demonstrates how ontology sharing is formalizable within the conceptual knowledge model of Information Flow (IF). Information Flow indirectly represents sharing through a specifiable, ontology extension hierarchy augmented with synonymic type equivalencing - two ontologies share terminology and meaning through a common generic ontology that each extends. Using the paradigm of participant community ontologies formalized as IF logics, a common shared extensible ontology formalized as an IF theory, participant community specification links from the common ontology to the participating community ontology formalizable as IF theory interpretations, this paper argues that ontology sharing is concentrated in a virtual ontology of community connections, and demonstrates how this virtual ontology is computable as the fusion of the participant ontologies - the quotient of the sum of the participant ontologies modulo the ontological sharing structure.