Ontology Quiz
ISAO 2016, 29 June 2016, Bolzano, Italy
Rules
A team may choose the question number among the
questions that have not passed the revue yet.
A team has 1 minute to answer that question.
If a team does not know the answer and did not try to
answer the question, the question goes to another team
immediately.
Each team may search online for an answer for at most
two questions.
Note: The level of difficulty of the questions varies
quite a lot.
Question 1
In terms of computational complexity, what is the
principal difference between first order predicate logic
and a description logic?
Answer: DLs are decidable fragments of FOL
Question 2
Who proposed mereology about a century ago, and
may be considered the ‘father’ of mereology?
Answer: Stanislaw Lesniewski
Question 3
Fill in the blank:
Ollie’s Macbook Air : Macbook Air, IAOA : ____?
Answer: Organisation
Basically: an instance ‘stands to’ class/concept/universal
Question 4
What are in the corners of Ogden’s semiotic triangle?
Answer: sign/symbol, thought/reference/concept, and
thing/referent
Question 5
In which year was OWL standardised?
Answer: 2004
Question 6
Which foundational/top-level ontology is used most
often for ontologies in biology?
A. DOLCE
B. BFO
C. YAMATO
D. GIST
Answer: B
Question 7
Consider parthood in mereology. Which of the
following is NOT a mereological parthood (be this part
of or has part, for class or instance)?
A. Katniss’ heart is part of Katniss’ body
B. Swallowing is part of eating
C. Clay is part of a vase
D. South Tyrol is part of Italy
Answer: C
correct relation: constitution
Question 8
Which one is the odd one out, and why?
A. Proton
B. Neutron
C. Electron
D. Chronon
Answer: D
The other three are physical objects, whereas chronon is
the smallest timeslice (used in several temporal logics)
Question 9
Which one is a foundational/top-level ontology?
A. YATLO
B. AWO
C. OFU
D. GFO
Answer: D
YATLO [yet another top level ontology] is made-up,
AWO is a tutorial ontology, OFU has the letters in the
wrong order (UFO is the name)
Question 10
What is the year of publication of Leonard and
Goodman’s “Calculus of Individuals”?
Answer: 1940
Question 11
If parthood is interpreted as set inclusion, what is the
set-theoretic relation corresponding to overlap?
Answer: Intersection
Question 12
Does the mereological principle of strong
supplementation imply the extensionality of parthood?
Answer: yes
Question 13
Who introduced the term “gunk” to refer to a domain
in which everything can be divided for ever into
smaller and smaller parts?
Answer: David Lewis
In: Parts of Classes (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991)
Question 14
Given the principle of unique unrestricted
composition (to the effect that every plurality of things
has a unique fusion), which of the following additional
principles will suffice to yield a complete
axiomatization of classical mereology?
A. antisymmetry of part
B. transitivity of part
C. weak supplementation
Answer: C
Question 15
What is the definition of qua-object?
Answer: in the character (or role) of. There are several
more comprehensive descriptions, summarised neatly
here:
http://www.philosophie.ch/philipp/teaching/metaphy
sics10/handout12.pdf
Question 16
Who’s the author of “Making the Social World: The
Structure of Human Civilization”?
A. Kevin Mulligan
B. John Searle
C. Barry Smith
Answer: B
Question 17
When was the earliest published occurrence of the
word “ontology”?
Answer: 1606, in Jacob Lorhard "Ogdoas Scholastica"
Question 18
In what sense, if any, could Paleontology be considered
a branch of Ontology?
Answer: It deals with, amongst other things, the
classification and identification of extinct species. So
one could argue yes because of the classification aspects
and describing things. Or no, because they’re extinct
(realist, prescriptive etc.)
Question 19
Is a tornado an object, a process, or an event?
Answer: It could be any of these depending on the
point of view from which it is described - lots of scope
for interesting discussion there!
Question 20
What does RCC stand for?
Answer: Region Connection Calculus
Question 21
Sets have members as their most basic constituents.
What is the counterpart to that in mereology?
Answer: Atom
Question 22
What are the two core temporal constructs or operators
from which others—such as ‘some time in the future’,
‘at all times’, and ‘the previous instant’—can be
defined?
Answer: The Since and Until operators
Question 23
Which of the following relation(s) really do require a
temporal modality to represent its meaning fully?
A. x precedes y
B. x is derived from y
C. x is an immutable part of y
D. x participates in y
Answer: A-C.
Immutable part too: x is an essential part of y for as long
as it is an instance of X. Participation not necessarily,
though it could have some duration added to it.
Question 24
Which of the following one(s) is(are) OWL 2 profile(s)?
A. OWL 2 Full
B. OWL 2 EL
C. OWL 2 TL
D. OWL 2 DL
Answer: B.
OWL 2 DL is the most expressive DL-based OWL
species, so not a profile. OWL 2 Full is even more
expressive. “TL” is made-up (though that abbreviation is
would be in line with QL and RL naming)
Question 25
Which DL reasoner ‘revolutionised’ (substantially
improved performance of) automated reasoning over
DL knowledge bases in the 1990s?
Answer: FaCT
Question 26
You want the automated reasoner to deduce that your
mother’s sister is your aunt. Which language feature do
you need for that?
Answer: OWL 2’s property chains, or, more generally:
role composition
Question 27
You need to represent in an ontology the concept
land-locked country (e.g., Switzerland, Lesotho).
Which theory (logic and/or Ontology) will help you do
that?
Answer: (mereo)topology
Question 28
According to which foundational ontology is Death an
achievement?
Answer: DOLCE
Question 29
What is the difference between meronymy and
mereology?
Answer:
meronymy refers to ‘part’ in natural language phrases,
mereology in Ontology
meronymy, the part-of relation making up the
hierarchies called meronomies or partonomies, bears on
linguistic terms (hence the "nymy" suffix) denoting
classes, as for hyperonymy in taxonomies, while in
mereology the part-of relation bears on individuals
Question 30
Is the Ontology Quiz a continuant, an occurrent,
both, or neither?
Answer: depends…
The quiz qua collection of questions to be answered,
which is a continuant;
The actual event on Wednesday evening when the
questions are posed and people attempt to answer them,
which is an occurrent.
Question 31
What is DOL?
Answer: The Distributed Ontology, Model and
Specification Language
Question 32
Can an identity criterion be based on the
identification of an essential part?
Answer: no, unless the essential part comes with a
clear identity criterion itself. Identity criteria are based
on properties, not the on the identity of other entities
on the pain of regression
Question 33
What is the proper term in ontology of those objects
that in natural language are generally referred to with
mass nouns?
Answer: stuff, amount of matter
That is, those uncountables, or only countable in
quantities; e.g., gold, water, mayonnaise, beer
Question 34
What is the complexity of reasoning in ALC with
respect to a TBox?
A. ExpTime
B. PSpace
C. NP
Answer: A. Reasoning w.r.t. TBox is ExpTimecomplete. (It would be PSpace in case of an empty
Tbox)
Question 35
What is the Description Logic reasoning service useful
to generate a Taxonomy in an Ontology
A. Query Answering
B. Concept Subsumption
C. Instance Checking
Answer: B.
Question 36
DLs have sound and complete reasoning/inference
algorithms. Why is this an important feature?
A. No wrong inferences are drawn.
B. All the correct inferences are drawn.
C. Both A. and B. holds
Answer: C., indeed
A. Is true for a Sound algorithm, and
B. Holds for complete algorithms.
Question 37
What is the main reason for the success of the DL-Lite
fragments when using them to build Ontologies?
A. Reasoning in DL-Lite is computationally tractable.
B. Query answering is reducible to DBMS technology.
C. They have a small number of constructors.
Answer: B., indeed query answering over a DL-Lite
ontology is FO-rewritable (i.e., it is AC0 in Data
complexity as for DBMS queries).
Question 38
The notion of Certain Answer differs from that one of
a query in a DBMS setting because:
A. We need to deal with incomplete information.
B. We need to deal with complete information.
C. We need to make sure that the answer in certainly in
the DBMS.
Answer: A. Indeed, certain answer are those ones that
hold in ALL possible models of the Knowledge Base
(i.e., an incomplete DB + a set of constraints)
Question 39
Did the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR – East
Germany) and the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (FDR West Germany) share a border between 1949 and 1990?
Answer: NO, because the Bundesrepublik Deutschland
never officially recognized the DDR border. So, the
border between the DDR and the FDR was established
and declared unilaterally by the DDR.
Question 40
Since when does Germany exist?
A. Since 18 January 1871 when, at the Versailles Palace, Princes of the
German states gathered there to proclaim Wilhelm
I of Prussia as German Emperor after the French capitulation in
the Franco-Prussian War
B. Since the Treaty of Verdun in 843, when the Carolingian Empire
was divided into three parts, and the Eastern Part became known
as the kingdom of Germany.
C. Since the first Century CE, when Julius Ceasar used the term
Germania to designate the tribes North of the Alps.
Answer: Any of the above, depending on your criteria of what
”Germany” is
Question 41
Which of the options below contains a list of UN member
states, which are not recognized as sovereign states by at
least one UN member?
A. Republic of China, Armenia, Palestine
B. South Korea, Armenia, Israel
C. Israel, Kosovo, Palestine
D. South Korea, Kosovo, South Ossetia
Answer: South Korea is not recognized by North Korea,
which is a UN member. Armenia is not recognized by
Pakistan. Israeal is not recognized by 48 UN member states.
Kosovo, Palestine and South Ossetia are not UN members.
Question 42
Do mountains exist?
A. Yes, because humans refer to landforms such as “Mont
Blanc” and “Mont Everest” in their discourse and
everyday conversation.
B. No, because all mathematical representations of terrain
do not need the concept of a “mountain”.
C. It depends on the definition of “exist”
Answer: Mountains may be necessary concepts of a
human description of landforms, but are not required
in computer representations of terrain.
Acknowledgements
The questions were set by:
Maria Keet
Achille Varzi
Antony Galton
Alessandro Artale
Gilberto Camara
Laure Vieu
Roberta Ferrario