Ontological Category Systems: Notes on the Foundations of their Epistemic Architectures

Resource and energy efficiency of industrial production, in particular, food production, is a defining requirement that will ensure its functioning without loss of quality and quantity of final products. This is achieved by observing the requirements for the operational parameters of the company’s technological processes and their operational changes. Given the complexity of the functioning of the energy component of the world and Ukraine due to military operations and their consequences, the issue of quality/cost ratio has become more acute. Therefore, for large manufacturing enterprises, the development of systems for supporting management decision-making in accordance with the Industry 4.0 concept becomes relevant. This will contribute to improving the production and economic indicators of the enterprise through coordinated actions of all links of production activities by structuring and processing large amounts of heterogeneous information. The purpose of the study is to develop a decision support system for the task of choosing the structure of an automated control system based on an ontological knowledge base. The developed application ontology uses descriptive logic and is interpreted as part of a digital production double implemented by a single ontological knowledge base and ontological repository. Considering existing international standards, the OWL2 language was chosen for the implementation of the ontological knowledge base. The ontology system architecture contains an ontology server, a Node-Red application, and a user form. A project decision support system that issues recommendations based on requests for the structure of the control system for a technological facility with uncertainties, considering the requirements and restrictions set for each technological process of a food enterprise, reduces the time to choose the appropriate structures, schemes, and methods. Thus, the designer receives the necessary information, supported by knowledge from the subject area, for the synthesis of an effective automated control system. It is also assumed that the ontological system will be expanded by connecting new created applied ontologies that implement related tasks of an industrial enterprise

Two studies investigated whether knowledge about ontological category membership exists early in the word learning process—specifically, when words are partially known—and if so, how such knowledge is represented. Participants made decisions about the ontological category membership of words at three levels of knowledge: words they correctly defined (known), words recognized as familiar (frontier), and words mistakenly identified as nonwords (unknown). Accuracy on this task improved as a function of word level. Participants were able to identify the broad ontological categories to which words at all three levels of knowledge belonged, as well as the more specific ontological categories to which the words belonged. Overall, results indicated that knowledge about ontological category membership is available for words at very low levels of knowledge, and that this knowledge does not necessarily follow the strict hierarchical organization some ontological systems are thought to embody (e.g. Keil 1979). Implications for the acquisition and representation of word meanings are discussed.

The subject of the article is the role of ontological systems in improving the processes of structuring and analyzing scientific content, especially in the context of STEM education. The goal of the work is to research and analyze the application of ontological systems in the context of managing educational materials in STEM education. The use of such approaches is focused on developing effective methods for structuring and presenting educational knowledge in the STEM education system, emphasizing the importance of integrating different scientific disciplines to optimize the educational process. In accordance with the purpose, the following tasks were set: to develop a methodology for creating and implementing ontological systems in STEM education and to develop the architecture of a virtual STEM center that would provide the implementation of the proposed principles. The research is based on the following methods: For the development of the architecture of the virtual STEM center, we used UML diagrams. We developed UML diagrams of roles and activities that illustrate the interaction of different users and systems, as well as demonstrate work processes and interactions in multi-agent systems. Special attention is paid to activity diagrams, which reflect the processing of user requests and the interaction of the stemua.science agent with other components of the STEM center. The following results were obtained: A modular system architecture of the virtual STEM center was developed and described using UML diagrams, which includes roles such as the STEM center administrator, editor, author, and user, as well as the administrator of the CIT "Polyhedron". The interaction of these roles with the virtual STEM center is described in detail, revealing the mechanisms of their interaction and joint work aimed at creating, filling, and editing content in the transdisciplinary STEM center. The process of optimizing work processes in the modular system of the virtual STEM center is also considered. Ways to fill and use the T-STEM center in an ontological form have been identified. The interaction of software entities of the T-STEM center in an ontological form has been analyzed. Conclusions: Based on the conducted research, it is concluded that the use of ontological systems in the context of managing educational materials in STEM education is an effective method for structuring and presenting scientific content, promoting the integration of various scientific disciplines, and optimizing the learning process. It is determined that ontological systems are an effective method for structuring and presenting scientific content, facilitating the integration of various scientific disciplines, and optimizing the learning process. The modular architecture of the system is found to facilitate efficient interaction among different roles and automate workflow processes. Integration with a multi-agent system allows for the use of external data sources and ensures interoperability with other systems. For the further development of the system, research is needed to enhance the efficiency of role interactions and workflow automation. Additionally, research on integrating the system with other STEM education systems is necessary.

This article examines a characteristic of property entitlements that is fundamental to the structure of property systems that has received scant academic attention, a characteristic referred to as the mutual exclusivity principle. According to this principle, a property system does not allow for the existence of incompatible rights. Two people cannot separately be the owners of the same resource, for instance. By contrast, two people can each hold valid but contradictory contract rights to the resource. Although the existing property literature has stressed the “exclusive” nature of property, the various ways in which property is imagined to be exclusive, such as by conferring “rights to exclude,” fail to capture the essence of property as a distinct legal institution. Unlike these alternative conceptions of exclusiveness, the mutual exclusivity principle holds true across the range of different types of property entitlements, including not just fee simple ownership but also security interests and servitudes, and across the range of assets subject to property law, including not just land and physical objects but also intangibles like intellectual property and corporate shares.Recognizing the role of the mutual exclusivity principle yields a number of practical insights. It helps explain various institutional features of property law, such as the system of future interests, the use of possession-based rules, the role of recording systems, and the negative, thing-based structure of property entitlements. It illuminates connections between property and other fields like corporations law and it calls into question aspects of existing doctrine, such as the preferred status of exclusion rights under the U.S. Constitution’s Takings Clause. It also modifies the influential theory that property law is heavily shaped by problems of high information costs: while existing accounts seem to suppose that property law entails relatively high information costs because it imposes a relatively broad set of duties on others, many of the information cost problems identified in the literature actually result from the mutual exclusivity problem, rather than from the breadth of property duties.At a more general level, understanding the centrality of the mutual exclusivity principle suggests some change in direction is called for within the wider property literature. American property scholarship has been preoccupied with questions about the scope and strength of property rights, overlooking the separate problem of ascertaining who happens to hold a given right, a problem distinctive to property law. Property, this article argues, is at least as much about title chains, patent searches, and creditor priorities as it is about trespass, remedies, and eminent domain.

Deductive databases are coming of age with the emergence of efficient and easy-to-use systems that support queries, reasoning, and application development on databases through declarative logic-based languages. The progress is demonstrated by the completion of prototype systems offering such levels of generality, performance, and robustness that they support well complex application development. An overview of the architectures and techniques of these systems is provided. The main motivations for development of the deductive database systems (DDSs) are: (1) to provide support for advanced database applications, with a focus on expert systems and knowledge-based applications; and (2) to provide better support for traditional database applications by integrating the application development and database queries into one language, thus solving the impedance mismatch problems. The key implementation problems for DDSs pertain to finding efficient executions for the given set of rules and queries. For this purpose, the DDS performs a global analysis of rules. The cornerstone of this analysis is the notion of bound arguments and free arguments of predicates. >

This Article examines a characteristic of property entitlements fundamental to the structure of property systems that has received scant academic attention, a characteristic referred to as the mutual exclusivity principle. According to this principle, a property system does not allow for the existence of incompatible rights. Two people cannot separately be the owners of the same resource, for instance. By contrast, two people can each hold valid but contradictory contract rights to the resource. Although the existing property literature has stressed the “exclusive” nature of property, the various ways in which property is imagined to be exclusive, such as by conferring “rights to exclude,” fail to capture the essence of property as a distinct legal institution. Unlike these alternative conceptions of exclusiveness, the mutual exclusivity principle holds true across the range of different types of property entitlements, including not just fee simple ownership but also security interests and servitudes, and across the range of assets subject to property law, including not just land and physical objects but also intangibles like intellectual property and corporate shares. Recognizing the role of the mutual exclusivity principle yields a number of practical insights. It helps explain various institutional features of property law, such as the system of future interests, the use of possession-based rules, the role of recording systems, and the negative, thing-based structure of property entitlements. It illuminates connections between property and other fields like corporations law and it calls into question aspects of existing doctrine, such as the preferred status of exclusion rights under the U.S. Constitution’s Takings Clause. It also modifies the influential theory that property law is heavily shaped by problems of high information costs: while existing accounts seem to suppose that property law entails relatively high information costs because it imposes a relatively broad set of duties on others, many of the information cost problems identified in the literature actually result from the mutual exclusivity problem, rather than from the breadth of property duties. At a more general level, understanding the centrality of the mutual exclusivity principle suggests some change in direction is called for within the wider property literature. American property scholarship has been preoccupied with questions about the scope and strength of property rights, overlooking the separate problem of ascertaining who happens to hold a given right, a problem distinctive to property law. Property, this Article argues, is at least as much about title chains, patent searches, and creditor priorities as it is about trespass, remedies, and eminent domain.

The Department of Defense is promulgating the use of commercial standards and open system principles with regard to ATE acquisitions. This paper describes a strategy being used to adopt commercial standards into a test system architecture based on open system principles. Technology specific ATS can be derived from this general ATS architecture and retain the benefits expressed at the general level. The architecture will promote costs savings in three areas: component interchangeability, Test Program Set (TPS) transportability, and test data exchange.

The architecture of the numerical cognition system is currently not well understood, but at a general level, assumptions are made about two core components: a quantity processor and an identity processor. The quantity processor is concerned with accessing and using the stored magnitude denoted by a given digit, and the identity processor is concerned with recovery of the corresponding digit's identity. Blanc-Goldhammer and Cohen (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40, 1389-1403, 2014) established that the recovery and use of quantity information operates in an unlimited-capacity fashion. Here we assessed whether the identity processor operates in a similar fashion. We present two experiments that were digit identity variations of Blanc-Goldhammer and Cohen's magnitude estimation paradigm. The data across both experiments reveal a limited-capacity identity processor whose operation reflects cross-talk with the quantity processor. Such findings provide useful evidence that can be used to adjudicate between competing models of the human number-processing system.

Chapter 11 - Aspects of Lexical Access: Evidence from Aphasia

This paper presents two contributions: (i) a system architecture capable of staging platform-independent choreographies within different virtual worlds, and (ii) an ontology-based solution for capturing and representing multi-user choreographies with reduced time/effort. We argue that choreographies for virtual worlds should be clearly separated from the technical characteristics of their execution in virtual world technological platforms. Due to the heterogeneity of the various virtual worlds and their domain requirements, we propose exploiting the modularity, generality, and granularity dimensions of ontologies to simplify and empower the choreography modeling capabilities. Instead of a unique ontology, several ontologies with different levels of generality and granularity can be progressively combined to support the modeling requirements of a given choreography. Because these ontologies are aligned with the ontology of each specific virtual world platform, the mapping and transformation between the core ontology is simplified and automated, thus reducing the development and time-to-market.

The secondary use of clinical data is an essential part of translational and comparative effectiveness research. In designing user interfaces for querying clinical data, we found challenges in managing disease classification codes, medication history, and computed indices, which were amplified by the longitudinal nature of clinical care. In order to address these challenges, we integrate domain-specific and standardized ontological/terminological systems as plug-and-play components in the system architecture for data exploration and user interface support. We present an ontology-driven query interface framework called VISAGE+ (Visual Aggregator and Explorer Plus), which is capable of: (a) mapping multiple data sources and database columns to single concepts in an ontological system, (b) querying multi-dimensional data using concept attributes, and (c) supporting queries that require transitive closure over the ontology class hierarchy (a.k.a. subsumption reasoning). Three VISAGE+ instances have been deployed for large-scale multi-center projects in Sleep Medicine, Epilepsy, and for exploring Medicare and Medicaid data. These instances demonstrate the generality and flexibility of the VISAGE+ framework in supporting large-scale data federation, novel user-interface features, and the usability of the interfaces and systems for clinical research.

Unemployment rates are high in people with schizophrenia, so that considerable importance is attached to measures to improve their ability to work and their vocational integration. In a study of the German Research Network on Schizophrenia the long-term effects of four-week vocational and ergotherapeutic measures on in-patients were investigated. The target criteria were the vocational integration, level of general functioning (Global Assessment of Functioning Scale) and psychopathology (Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale). 227 patients were randomized and assigned either to a work-oriented vocational therapy group, or to a creativity-oriented ergotherapy group; 163 patients completed the study. Data was available for 89 patients at the last catamnesis point after two years. No differences were seen between the effects of the two forms of therapy on the development of vocational integration or on general functioning level and psychopathology after two years. The number of patients in regular work declined over this period. It is assumed from this that short-lasting vocational and ergotherapeutic measures do not have any long-term influence on the vocational integration of patients with schizophrenia.

In Semantic and Conceptual Development , Frank Keil presents the first psychological investigation of the developing child's ontological knowledge. Building on previous philosophical work, Keil shows that ontological categories develop in a highly predictable progression. Moreover, Keil demonstrates that ontological development obeys a strong formal constraint on the relations among categories. Although there are many possible ontological systems, children appear to be inherently targeted to consider a system of only one sort. Keil's results represent exactly the sort of interdisciplinary study of the human mind which is gradually emerging as the new field of cognitive science. We are proud to publish his work as the first book in the Cognitive Science Series, which is designed to foster major empirical and theoretical contributions to this new field.

Objective/context: This research aims to bring closer contributions of the ethnographic approach to diplomatic works, both at a specific and a general level, in the discipline of International Relations, establishing connections, homologous methods, critical points, and inflections. Methodology: The article uses a qualitative methodology with an ethnographic approach to stress some classical and ontological categories of the international discipline, allowing a discussion of the scope, contributions, and novelty of the ethnographic method specifically for diplomatic studies. It also presents a review of specialized literature by authors who have studied the cultural variable in diplomatic studies. This approach allows examining basic premises of the discipline of International Relations, such as national interest, the constitution of the state, and state exclusivity in the diplomatic field, among other classic categories, that do not fully account for the existence of processes and emerging actors invisible in the internationalist debate. Conclusions: The article argues that the discipline of International Relations challenges its most representative arguments and categories by adhering to anthropological reflections. The results suggest that ethnographic approaches stress certain classical terms and ontologies of the international discipline, which has been possible through discussing the scope, contributions, and novelty of the ethnographic method specifically for diplomatic studies. Originality: This unpublished research study reveals a counterpoint between two large, apparently dissimilar theoretical corpora: anthropology and international relations.

Geological modeling currently uses various computer-based applications. Data harmonization at the semantic level using ontologies is essential to make these applications interoperable. Since geo-modeling is part of several multidisciplinary projects, interoperability requires semantic harmonization to exchange information between geological applications and integrate other domain knowledge at a general level. Therefore, domain ontologies that describe geological knowledge must be based on a sound ontological background to ensure this knowledge is integrable. Faults are essential for understanding and solving structural problems but are complex to model because the concept of fault includes a group of geological entities with a distinct ontological nature. A fault can correspond to thin, deformed rock volumes or spatial arrangements resulting from the displacement of geological blocks, but at a broader scale, geologists describe faults as surfaces or components of complex fault arrays. Our work intends to harmonize these views by presenting a domain ontology, GeoFault, resting on the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and the GeoCore ontology. GeoCore and GeoFault support the parametric description of geological sites as a preliminary step for quantitative and qualitative analysis. We have proposed GeoFault after systematically revising the literature and several knowledge-acquisition sessions with expert structural geologists. The ontology formalizes a vocabulary for fault “sensu stricto,” excluding ductile shear deformations. It covers the regional to outcrop scales, excluding structures at the microscopic, orogenic, and tectonics scales, and it avoids interpretive language associated with geological processes as far as possible. Extending the BFO and GeoCore ontologies allows the fault concept to be related to formal ontological classes in a consistent semantic-rich framework. The ontology artifact is implemented in OWL 2, validated by competency questions with two use cases, and tested using an in-house ontology-driven data entry application. The GeoFault ontology is publicly available and provides a solid framework for clarifying fault knowledge and a foundation for many applications.