Toward cognitivist ontologies : on the role of selective attention for upper ontologies.

Ontologies play a key role in modern information society although there are still many fundamental questions regarding their structure to be answered. In this paper, some of these are presented, and it is argued that they require a shift from realist to cognitivist ontologies, with ontology design crucially depending on taking both cognitive and linguistic aspects into consideration. A detailed discussion of central parts of a proposed cognitivist upper ontology based on qualitative representations of selective attention is presented.