Limits of Formal Ontology

I am thinking of volunteering to help with the Stanford-CSLI Semantic Verb Ontology, which would involve studying Prolog.

A passage in Sowa's Knowledge Representation book Appendix B reminded me of how heroically radical some of the assumptions of Formal Ontology are.

An informal ontology may be specified by a catalog of types that are either undefined or defined only by statements in a natural language. A formal ontology is specified by a collection of names for concept and relation types organized in a partial ordering by the type-subtype relation.

This fixes a set of names, in a lexical ontology, the set of lexical items in the shared verbal lexicon of the speech/sign community. More questionable is that it fixes the set of types, where the cognitive reality may be dynamically changing family resemblances of language games.

This seems to be committed to the tradition of compositional semantics from lexical tokens. In construction grammar, the constructions themselves contribute meaning, not just the lexical items. Perhaps it is possible to rescue a multi-level compositionality, as in the type hierarchy of HPSG-style CxG (in Sag's draft), but again maybe not.

Also, there seems to be a tradition strong autonomy of the grammar (the syntax, and also the structural semantics) from the lexicon (with its lexical semantics). On the other hand, systemic functional theories have long emphasized an integrated lexicogrammar as the field where functional choices are made.