We aim to establish that there is at least one role for constructionalism in applied ontology by giving the case history of an early example of a case where the foundations of a top-level ontology are constructionally refactored. What we have called ‘taking the constructional turn’. The example is the BORO foundational ontology which has, over the last decade, been taking this turn. The paper starts by providing an evolutionary context for the case history. It then provides a chronological profile of the constructional turn and the radical enrichment it delivered. This clearly establishes the feasibility and benefits of this specific role for constructionalism in applied ontology.

This presentation looks at the strategic question: where do we go from here? Where here is a situation where the fidelity of interoperability is too low. It suggests the answer is going to be in developing the ring forms(s).

Presentation Structure:

• BORO situation: setting up the strategic question
• Framing – then leveraging – the challenge
  
  • a human information evolution perspective: a narrow framework
  • a biological information evolution perspective: a wider framework
  • a digital information transmission perspective: visualising interoperability
  • an information evolution population analysis
• Innovation
  
  • innovation and diffusion (adoption): a frame for human information evolution
  • post-digitalisation – evolved-digital
• Adding form explicitly to the framing
  
  • some of our form challenges
• Summary

The paper sketches some initial results from an ongoing project to develop an ontology-based digital form for representing uncertain information. We frame this work as a journey from lower to higher levels of digital maturity across a technology divide. The paper first sets a baseline by describing the basic challenges any project dealing with digital uncertainty faces. It then describes how the project is facing them. It shows firstly how an extensional ontology (such as the BORO Foundational Ontology or the Information Exchange Standard) can be extended with a Lewisian counterpart approach to formalizing uncertainty that is adapted to computing. And then it shows how this is expressive enough to handle the challenges.

Our aim in this paper is to outline how the design space for the ontologization process is richer than current practice would suggest. We point out that engineering processes as well as products need to be designed – and identify some components of the design. We investigate the possibility of designing a range of radically new practices, providing examples of the new practices from our work over the last three decades with an outlier methodology, bCLEARer. We also suggest that setting an evolutionary context for ontologization helps one to better understand the nature of these new practices and provides the conceptual scaffolding that shapes fertile processes. Where this evolutionary perspective positions digitalization (the evolutionary emergence of computing technologies) as the latest step in a long evolutionary trail of information transitions. This reframes ontologization as a strategic tool for leveraging the emerging opportunities offered by digitalization.