Why is a monolithic upper level ontology considered harmful?
One technique for ontology creation and management is the development of a monolithic upper level ontology filled with various top-level categories that would be used to generate others. The IFF regards this as a recipe for failure, and advocates its rejection. Throughout history, new conceptions have continually arisen that caused total disruption of the status quo (the currently formalized conceptions). Recent disruptive conceptions in science and technology include: from Physics the concepts of relativity and quantum mechanics; from Biology the cell concept, energy and photosynthesis, respiration, energy and ecosystems, the genetic control of development, Mendelian heredity, and Darwinian evolution; from Computer Systems the concept of an algorithm, the stored program concept, the compilation of higher level programming languages; etc. New disruptive conceptions cause communities to reformulate their knowledge space. This will continue into the future. More important than the monoli
