Designing Foundational Ontologies The Object-Centered High-level REference Ontology OCHRE as a Case Study Luc Schneider   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Workflows, Patterns, and Ontologies Abstract Foundational ontologies are axiomatic theories about high-level domain-independent categories of the real world. They constitute toolboxes of eminently reusable information modelling primitives for building application ontologies about specific domains. The design of foundational ontologies confronts the conceptual modeller with completely new challenges in respect of their content as well as their formalisation. As a case study, this article outlines the axiomatisation of the Object-Centered High-level REference ontology OCHRE, comparing its basic conceptual modelling choices with those underlying DOLCE, a foundational ontology developed in the Wonderweb project. ©2005 Association for Computing Machinery