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This ontology supports the development of Protégé ontologies using the OntoClean methodology (PDF). This methodology for ontological analysis was developed by N. Guarino and C. Welty. The OntoClean methodology applies the notions used for ontological analysis in philosophy to analyzing conceptual modeling in information systems. If you include this Protégé ontology in your ontology, you can annotate your classes with meta-properties of identity, unity, essence, and dependence. The OntoClean ontology in Protégé also contains constraints in the Protégé Axiom Language (PAL) enabling you to verify whether the ontology is "clean"---does not violate any of the constraints based on these properties.

In 2000, Nicola Guarino and Chris Welty published a series of papers on what came to be named OntoClean, a methodology for ontology-driven conceptual analysis. The methodology has been receiveing increasing levels of attention in various communities, and on this page we hope to provide a central repository for information regarding OntoClean, to help keep the community in touch with how the methodology is being implemented, supported, used, extended, and referenced.

OntoClean is a methodology for validating the ontological adequacy of taxonomic relationships. It is based on highly general ontological notions drawn from philosophy, like essence, identity, and unity, which are used to characterize relevant aspects of the intended meaning of the properties, classes, and relations that make up an ontology. These aspects are represented by formal metaproperties, which impose several constraints on the taxonomic structure of an ontology.