Formal ontology
In philosophy, the term formal ontology is used to refer to an ontology defined by axioms in a formal language with the goal to provide an unbiased (domain- and application-independent) view on reality, which can help the modeler of domain- or application-specific ontologies to avoid possibly erroneous ontological assumptions encountered in modeling large-scale ontologies. By maintaining an independent view on reality, a formal (upper level) ontology gains the following properties: indefinite expandability: the ontology remains consistent with increasing content.