Ontological emergence scheme in self-organized and emerging systems

Abstract

This paper presents the concept of “Ontological Emergence”, a process that seeks to adapt an ontology to the changes and new components in a self-organized and emergent system, through the application of a set of rules that allows the emergence of a new conceptualization (emerging concepts). The Ontological Emergence provides the structuration of the information and knowledge that could be generated in the system, creating conceptual models that can adequately represent the new behavior that is emerging. It arises from the need to represent ontologically a conceptualization of a reality that is dynamic, which cannot be pre-defined or pre-determined, in order to generate emerging knowledge models that follows the scalability and the evolution of it. In that sense, in this paper is proposed an “Ontological Emergence Scheme” based on a set of processes of registration, monitoring, analysis and adaptation of the various conceptual models that interact in the system, as well as on some processing rules in regard to requirements and information of the context, in order to allow the ontological emergence. In this proposal scheme, the Meta-ontologies guide the ontological emergence process through the definition of general categories, to facilitate the integration of concepts from different ontologies or data sources. Finally, the paper presents some case studies, showing its utility in self-organized and emergent systems.