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It seems I am lacking some nomenclature and after searching a few "keywords" I came out empty handed.

When one defines concepts in an ontology as subclasses of other concepts or being defined as being related in particular way (via relations) to other concepts, etc., one needs to assume some sort of (forgive me the imprecise/incorrect naming here) "base" / "atomic" / ? concepts. Intuitively these are the concepts we can derive all other concepts from, namely all other concepts are subsumed by these, and thus are just given.

Like one could say that "father is a person that has at least a child", and "child is a person" and we assume "person" is a concept that is just given and not defined.

Do these "base" / "atomic" have an agreed name in the standard literature?

Thanks for the clarification

Stanislav Kralin
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geguze
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  • `owl:Thing`? https://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-syntax/#Classes – Stanislav Kralin Jun 14 '23 at 08:38
  • I understand everything is a subclass of `Thing` but there are a bunch of "top level" classes that are subclasses of `Thing` and nothing else, right? Do these have a special name? Maybe not ... – geguze Jun 15 '23 at 04:28
  • Are you referring to primitive concepts, as opposed to defined concepts? A primitive class is only asserted to be a class, while a defined class is asserted to be a subclass of another primitive class, or of a restriction. – Ignazio Jun 15 '23 at 06:50

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