Definition Of Ontology Research Articles

Katie Erikson's caring theories. Part 2. The theory of caritative caring ethics and the theory of evidence.

In this article, Katie Eriksson's theory of caritative caring ethics and the theory of evidence, are described. Both theories are anchored in caritas, that is love, mercy and compassion. The theory of caritative caring ethics was first described by Eriksson in 1995, where seven assumptions or basic categories were elaborated. These were: the human being's dignity, the care relationship, invitation, responsibility, virtue, obligation or duty, and good and evil. Eriksson's theoretical contribution is that she makes a distinction between caring and nursing ethics, between inner and external ethics, and between natural and clinical ethics. Concerning the theory of evidence, Eriksson claims that a multidimensional scientific view of evidence in caring that focuses on the patient's world is necessary and vital. To see, realise, know, attest and revise constitute the ontological definitions of the concepts of evidence and evident. The theories are united by the core concepts of testimony and witnessing the human being's suffering. Eriksson points out that it is in the ethical acts that deeds are formed, based on ethos. The anchorage in an ethos means to have firm value-loaded judgements of an inner motive. Moreover, the anchorage in ethos presupposes a personal and natural ethic. The good deeds are realised in the relationship between the patient and the carer, but the caring ethics is not a professional or external ethics. Caring ethics is an ontological inner ethics meaning fellowship and the right to exist, but it is the patient's world and reality that decides the foundation and starting point for caritative caring ethics in clinical practice. The ultimate purpose and goal of caring are to guarantee the patient's dignity and absolute value as a human being.

Designing Guided User Tasks in VR Embodied Experiences

Virtual reality (VR) offers extraordinary opportunities in user behavior research to study and observe how people interact in immersive 3D environments. A major challenge of designing these 3D experiences and user tasks, however, lies in bridging the inter-relational gaps of perception between the designer, the user, and the 3D scene. Paul Dourish identified three gaps of perception: ontology between the scene representation and the user and designer interpretation, intersubjectivity of task communication between designer and user, and intentionality between the user's intentions and designer's interpretations. We present the GUsT-3D framework for designing Guided User Tasks in embodied VR experiences, i.e., tasks that require the user to carry out a series of interactions guided by the constraints of the 3D scene. GUsT-3D is implemented as a set of tools that support a 4-step workflow to (1) annotate entities in the scene with navigation and interaction possibilities, (2) define user tasks with interactive and timing constraints, (3) manage interactions, task validation, and user logging in real-time, and (4) conduct post-scenario analysis through spatio-temporal queries using ontology definitions. To illustrate the diverse possibilities enabled by our framework, we present two case studies with an indoor scene and an outdoor scene, and conducted a formative evaluation involving six expert interviews to assess the framework and the implemented workflow. Analysis of the responses show that the GUsT-3D framework fits well into a designer's creative process, providing a necessary workflow to create, manage, and understand VR embodied experiences.

Ontology Summit 2021 Communiqué: Ontology generation and harmonization

Advances in machine learning and the development of very large knowledge graphs have accompanied a proliferation of ontologies of many types and for many purposes. These ontologies are commonly developed independently, and as a result, it can be difficult to communicate about and between them. To address this difficulty of communication, ontologies and the communities they serve must agree on how their respective terminologies and formalizations relate to each other. The process of coming into accord and agreement is called “harmonization.” The Ontology Summit 2021 examined the overall landscape of ontologies, the many kinds of ontology generation and harmonization, as well as the sustainability of ontologies. The Communiqué synthesizes and summarizes the findings of the summit as well as earlier summits on related issues. One of the major impediments to harmonization is the relatively poor quality of natural language definitions in many ontologies. The summit surveyed the state of the art in natural language definition development, based on lexicographic principles, as well as examples of ongoing projects that are explicitly dealing with harmonization and sustainability.

Genius, Psychology, and the Formation of the Self in Nineteenth-Century Greece: G. M. Vizyenos's Psychological Studies on the Beautiful (1885)

In his essay "Intellectual Geniuses" in Psychological Studies on the Beautiful (1885), Georgios Vizyenos discusses the development of exceptional abilities by analyzing the psychological mechanism of inclination, common to all humans. Deftly displacing the question of genius toward the question of why people are different in the first place, he orchestrates a debate on the ontological definition of the soul, which allows him to criticize the Herbartian model dominant within the nascent field of psychology at the University of Athens. Along with its academic stakes, Vizyenos's reflection on genius has wider implications insofar as it revolves around questions of natural inequality and justice. His essay touches upon one of the core problems of modern capitalist democracies—namely, how to reconcile differences in abilities and talents with the ethical and political principle of equality.

Creating ontological definitions for use in science

Ontologies aim to represent the world in terms of uniquely defined classes and their properties which are expressed as relationships with other classes. They are becoming widely used in science to improve clarity, searching, inference and the ability to link data from different sources. Ontological definitions are descriptions that represent the essential properties of classes of entities (which include objects, object attributes and processes) that distinguish them from other classes. Classes have unique IRIs (Internationalised Resource Identifiers) that can be used for searching; they also have labels which are words of phrases that people can use to identify the class in passages of text or tables. This article provides a brief guide to help with writing good ontological definitions. The standard format of such a definition of a class, A, is: ‘a B that C’ or its semantic equivalent, where A is the class being defined, B is a parent class and C describes a set of properties of A that distinguish it from other members of B.

Philosophy of Science and the Kyoto School: An Introduction to Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime and Tosaka Jun by Dean Anthony Brink

Reviewed by: Philosophy of Science and the Kyoto School: An Introduction to Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime and Tosaka Jun by Dean Anthony Brink Dennis Stromback (bio) Philosophy of Science and the Kyoto School: An Introduction to Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime and Tosaka Jun. By Dean Anthony Brink. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Pp. xvi + 201. Paperback $22.95, ISBN 978-1-350-14110-0. There is certainly a lot of academic buzz these days around the relationship between Buddhism and physics. Of course, as we learned from Donald Lopez's famed book Buddhism and Science (2008), there is a long history, beginning in the nineteenth century, to this proclamation that Buddhism is compatible with modern day science. Indeed, Dean Anthony Brink's book Philosophy of Science and the Kyoto School: An Introduction to Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime and Tosaka Jun is one of many contemporary examples of this effort to forge this intimate connection--except that this effort is launched from the perspective of the Kyoto School's approach to physical phenomena. Unlike Lopez's work, which is less interested in verifying the accuracy of this relationship and more about exploring how and why these two seemingly disparate modes of inquiry have been so persistently linked throughout history,1 Brink's work is aimed at exploring "the implications of new developments in physics and related dialogues among Japan's leading philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century" (p. 1). And so, in all fairness, this book is not just another attempt at smoothing out the relationship between Buddhism and science, but rather an effort to examine the leading Kyoto School thinkers' assimilation, as well as contestation, of the latest developments and discoveries within physics in order to provide "opportunities for rethinking a range of issues touching on political philosophy as well as the philosophy of the foundation of physics" (p. 3). In this regard, Brink's book, for the most part, succeeds, but mainly because it sidesteps the romantic orbit many of the Buddhologists and philosophers have established in their quest to affirm their spiritual identity. Instead, what scholars and students will find in this short text is how these leading Kyoto School thinkers approach the problem of materiality and the sort of implications that could be derived therefrom that speak to issues in critical materialism and posthumanism (pp. 144–147). The book consists of five chapters, with three of them entirely devoted to Nishida Kitarō's, Tanabe Hajime's, and Tosaka Jun's engagement with physics [End Page 1] or science. The first chapter provides the historical background to the Kyoto School and sketches out the relationship the Kyoto School has had with the scientific and philosophical discoveries and innovations occurring in the Western world. From beginning to end, which is clear after reading the first chapter, the Kyoto School is framed as a unique world philosophy that comes close to the insights formulated within the theory of relativity and quantum physics. And while the last chapter, "What We can Learn from the Kyoto School," summarizes the central points of the book, it is also the venue where Brink ceremoniously crowns Nishida and Tanabe as the true champions of cross-cultural scientific humanism. As Brink ponders, "Nishida and Tanabe have dedicated their thoughts and schematic forays into definitions of modern modes of relationality in ways that stand apart from the work of others attempting similar definitions in ontologies and epistemologies inflected by modern physics" (p. 137). What about Tosaka Jun? For Brink, Tosaka never stayed up to date on the research developments of physics and therefore defaulted to a position that refuses "to situate dialectics in a post-causal way" (p. 136). In the second chapter, Brink discusses the areas of Nishida's philosophy that engage scientists like Heinrich Hertz, Rudolf Lotze, and Herman Minkowski. According to Brink, Nishida borrows from these scientists, as well as from many other philosophers of the day, in order to clarify the quasi-dialectical relation between subject and object (p. 16). Nishida was dedicated to establishing a nondualistic relationship between subject and object from the very beginning, and as his work evolved over time, he would begin, for instance, to incorporate...

Towards a correct by construction design of complex systems: The MBSS approach

We present in this paper the Model Based System Synthesis (MBSS) approach for the design of complex systems that are correct by construction. Where the usual Model Based System Engineering (MBSE) approach offers formalisms and tools to represent a candidate system, to analyze it, to simulate it and even to optimize it, MBSS proposes to represent the global design problem using a problem representation language and then to solve it by using adapted synthesis tools producing one or several solutions necessarily satisfying the expressed requirements. The two approaches are therefore complementary; the MBSS being more adapted to the preliminary design and system integration stages. After presenting the different categories of problems encountered in system design (sizing, configuration, allocation, architecture generation), MBSS and MBSE will be positioned in relation to each other. The main concepts of MBSS will be detailed in order to understand the specific representation needs of the approach. The structural and behavioral notions related to the sub-definite systems will be explained as well as the links to be established with the functional and non-functional requirements. The approach is illustrated using the DEPS design problem specification language and the DEPS Studio modeling and solving tool on a system design case study. The DEPS language combines structural modeling features specific to object-oriented principles and ontology definition capabilities for engineers with problem specification features from constraint programming. DEPS Studio is an integrated modeling and solving environment designed to model and resolve system synthesis problems. It allows the engineer to edit, compile, debug and solve problems expressed in DEPS. It integrates a mixed constraint programming solver. The approach can be applied on physical systems, software intensive or mixed systems (embedded or cyber-physical).

Ontological engineering for the definition of a COVID-19 pandemic ontology

COVID-19 has generated a lot of information in different formats, and one of them is in the ontology format. Also, there are previous ontologies from other disciplines that can help to analyze the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, due to the large quantity of COVID-19 information in the form of ontologies, approaches to ontology integration and interoperability could be beneficial. In this context, this research proposes a new ontology, called COVID-19 Pandemic ontology, which is the product of an ontological engineering process proposed in this research that allows the integration of several ontologies to cover all the aspects of this infectious disease. The ontological engineering process defines tasks of fusion, alignment, and linking for integrating the ontologies. The resulting pandemic ontology provides a simple repository for storing information about the COVID-19, reusing existing ontologies, to offer multiple views about the disease, including the social context. This ontology has been tested in different case studies to prove its capabilities to infer useful information about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Heterogeneity and Instability: Theoretical–Methodological Outcomes of Three Investigations on Land and Agrarian Movements and the State

The article presents a theoretical–methodological proposal to research movements and its connections based on the associations they establish. The first investigation focuses on the transformations of the South African Landless People’s Movement, the second on interactions between Brazilian rural movements and the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform, the third focuses on the transnational ties of the Brazilian National Confederation of Agricultural Workers. We produce an ontological definition of movements and the state as collectives whose existence is defined by continuous assemblages of heterogeneous and unstable elements. Those collectives are not enclosed analytical units, but contingent and contextual. Methodologically, we suggest the observation of the processes in the long term to grasp the continuous constructions of those collectives, even before they reach public expression. Controversies are analytical categories for understanding which elements allow things to take the course we analyze.

Colin E. Gunton’s Christological Anthropology: Humanity’s Relationships in the Image of Christ

Abstract The anthropology of Colin E. Gunton begins with the Trinity and specifically, the person of Christ. From trinitarian persons, Gunton deduces the ontological definition of what it means to be a person, that is, a being in relationship and in distinction, or ‘free relatedness’. To be a person is to be in the image of the personal God, which is christological language, for it is Christ who bears the image of God in its fullness. As the true image bearer, Christ’s humanity is paradigmatic of what it means to be in relationship: with God, with the world and with other human persons. Gunton’s christology is also thoroughly pneumatological, borrowing Irenaeus’ metaphor of God’s ‘two hands in the world’: The Son and the Spirit. Not only do the Son and the Spirit mediate God’s presence to creation according to Irenaeus, but Gunton builds on this metaphor to include the Spirit’s mediation of the eternal Son to the Father as well as the Incarnate Son to humanity. The Spirit also reshapes humanity to be in the image of Christ, through his relationships with God, with the world and with other human persons. This is an eschatological project, for in this reshaping, the creation is recreated toward its teleological perfection. The article concludes with a potential direction for future study within Gunton’s christological anthropology. To conceive what it means to be human theologically, Gunton insists that we must look to Christ’s own person.

Types and taxonomic structures in conceptual modeling: A novel ontological theory and engineering support

Types are fundamental for conceptual modeling and knowledge representation, being an essential construct in all major modeling languages in these fields. Despite that, from an ontological and cognitive point of view, there has been a lack of theoretical support for precisely defining a consensual view on types. As a consequence, there has been a lack of precise methodological support for users when choosing the best way to model general terms representing types that appear in a domain, and for building sound taxonomic structures involving them. For over a decade now, a community of researchers has contributed to the development of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) - aimed at providing foundations for all major conceptual modeling constructs. At the core of this enterprise, there has been a theory of types specially designed to address these issues. This theory is ontologically well-founded, psychologically informed, and formally characterized. These results have led to the development of a Conceptual Modelling language dubbed OntoUML, reflecting the ontological micro-theories comprising UFO. Over the years, UFO and OntoUML have been successfully employed on conceptual model design in a variety of domains including academic, industrial, and governmental settings. These experiences exposed improvement opportunities for both the OntoUML language and its underlying theory, UFO. In this paper, we revise the theory of types in UFO in response to empirical evidence. The new version of this theory shows that many of OntoUML’s meta-types (e.g. kind, role, phase, mixin) should be considered not as restricted to substantial types but instead should be applied to model endurant types in general, including relator types, quality types, and mode types. We also contribute with a formal characterization of this fragment of the theory, which is then used to advance a new metamodel for OntoUML (termed OntoUML 2). To demonstrate that the benefits of this approach are extended beyond OntoUML, the proposed formal theory is then employed to support the definition of UFO-based lightweight Semantic Web ontologies with ontological constraint checking in OWL. Additionally, we report on empirical evidence from the literature, mainly from cognitive psychology but also from linguistics, supporting some of the key claims made by this theory. Finally, we propose a computational support for this updated metamodel.

COPri v.2 — A core ontology for privacy requirements

Nowadays, most enterprises collect, store, and manage personal information of customers to deliver their services. In such a setting, privacy has emerged as a key concern since companies often neglect or even misuse personal data. In response to multiple massive breaches of personal data, governments around the world have enacted laws and regulations for privacy protection. These laws dictate privacy requirements for any system that acquires and manages personal data. Unfortunately, these requirements are often incomplete and/or inaccurate as many RE practitioners are insufficiently versed with privacy requirements and how are they different from other requirements, such as security. To tackle this problem, we developed a comprehensive ontology for privacy requirements. In particular, the contributions of this work include the derivation of an ontology from a previously conducted systematic literature review, an implementation using an ontology definition tool (Protégé), a demonstration of its coverage through an extensive example on Ambient Assisted Living, and a validation through competency questions. Also, we evaluate the ontology against the common pitfalls for ontologies with the help of some software tools, lexical semantics experts, and privacy and security researchers. The ontology presented herein (COPri v.2) has been enhanced with extensions motivated by the feedback received from privacy and security experts.

Get the shovel: morphological and evolutionary complexities of belowground organs in geophytes

Herbaceous plants collectively known as geophytes, which regrow from belowground buds, are distributed around the globe and throughout the land plant tree of life. The geophytic habit is an evolutionarily and ecologically important growth form in plants, permitting novel life history strategies, enabling the occupation of more seasonal climates, mediating interactions between plants and their water and nutrient resources, and influencing macroevolutionary patterns by enabling differential diversification and adaptation. These taxa are excellent study systems for understanding how convergence on a similar growth habit (i.e., geophytism) can occur via different morphological and developmental mechanisms. Despite the importance of belowground organs for characterizing whole-plant morphological diversity, the morphology and evolution of these organs have been vastly understudied with most research focusing on only a few crop systems. Here, we clarify the terminology commonly used (and sometimes misused) to describe geophytes and their underground organs and highlight key evolutionary patterns of the belowground morphology of geophytic plants. Additionally, we advocate for increasing resources for geophyte research and implementing standardized ontological definitions of geophytic organs to improve our understanding of the factors controlling, promoting, and maintaining geophyte diversity.

Ontological Model of School Librarianship Based on Collaboration

Considering the definition of ontology as a common vocabulary for researchers (practitioners) who need to share information in a domain, we have established a set of concepts concerned with identifying, analyzing, describing and representing shared conceptualization in Croatian school librarianship. We have given a survey of research areas in the last 24 years. Approaching the problem of ontology, we applied it in the sense of information science, i.e., modeling language based on a common vocabulary and understanding when and how the modern concept of librarianship like media and information literacy, information needs, curriculum integration, e-learning etc. were introduced into Croatian school librarianship practice. The next step could be to dentify and to evaluate the strength of the various semantic links between found concepts. The key issue of school library ontology modeling is the answer to the question: how well the Croatian school librarian community is prepared to participate in building 21st century learning environments.

METHODOLOGICAL FEATURES OF PROFESSIONALLY ORIENTED EDUCATION OF PHYSICAL ENGINEERING DISCIPLINES BASED ON STEM TECHNOLOGIES: ASPECT OF ONTOLOGICAL APPROACH

The article considers the urgency of the problem of interrelation of teaching physics and professionally-oriented disciplines based on STEM-technologies in the conditions of ontological approach in the process of training students in engineering and technical education according to the educational-professional program of speciality 272 “Air Transport”. Developed and proposed methods of teaching physics based on STEM-technologies, taking into account the definition of ontology aimed at forming STEM skills in subjects, due to the statement before educational institutions significantly improve the quality of students’ knowledge, the role of learning in shaping student’s thinking and cognitive abilities development of STEM education. It is determined that one of the innovative directions of modern education is the introduction of STEM education, which involves the integration of sciences aimed at the development of STEM technologies, innovative thinking and meeting the need for well-trained engineering and technical specialists. The methodical features of professionally-oriented teaching of physical engineering disciplines based on STEM technologies taking into account the ontological approach are substantiated. In the process of conducting a pedagogical experiment, theoretical and empirical research methods were used. In particular, the analysis of philosophical, psychological-pedagogical, educational-methodical literature, recommended textbooks and manuals on methods of teaching physics in the context of the development of STEM education was carried out. Observations, questionnaires, testing, surveys, interviews with scientists and students were conducted. These experimental results were comprehensively analyzed and processed, quantitative data using the methods of mathematical statistics. The results of a comparative experiment to identify the effectiveness of the proposed method of teaching physics in the context of STEM education showed that the level of physical knowledge, skills and abilities of students in control groups is lower than the corresponding level in experimental groups.

Is There a Digital World?

This article discusses the relation between software and human experience. I argue that software-based experiences are based on a radical discrepancy between the code and “lived experience.” This break is different than the so-called “opacity” of technology. I start analyzing a case study: the video game Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Video games are one of the most profound digital experiences humans can have. When I play a video game I do not see the code. However, the code is the source of my experience. I claim that the code’s concealment is the necessary condition of the digital experience. I discuss the ontological definition of software as an entity. Software, I claim, is a complex object, composed of many different levels, whose unity is problematic. In the last part of the essay I argue that the break between lived experience and code is recomposed by imagination through the act of design.

A mathematical assessment on the ontology of time.

In this work, we develop and propose an ontological formal definition of time, based on a topological analysis of the formal mathematical description of time, coming from approaches to both quantum theories and Relativity; thus, being compatible with all physical epistemological theories. We find out a mathematical topological invariability, thus establishing a rigorous definition of time, as fundamental generic magnitude. Very preliminary analysis of physical epistemology is provided; likely highlighting a path towards a final common vision between Quantum and Cosmology ontology and human feeling of time.

Collaborative Intelligent Environment Perception and Mission Control of Scientific Researchers in Semantic Knowledge Framework Based on Complex Theory

In the traditional scientific research and production activities, due to the lack of sufficient communication and communication between researchers, the phenomenon of waste of scientific research resources occurs from time to time, which hinders the efficiency of scientific research output. Based on the design principle of the semantic knowledge framework, this paper puts forward the definition of ontology and semantic relationship of the collaborative system of scientific researchers. In this paper, a framework of collaborative semantic knowledge among researchers is established through decentralized semantic information exchange architecture. In this article, the simulation is verified by experiments and compared with other exchange architectures. The results of the experiment confirmed the semantic information exchange architecture based on semantic knowledge proposed in this paper is 10.39% faster than the traditional centralized method in terms of data volume; the construction speed under the data node perspective is 12.84% higher than that of the traditional centralized construction method; the subject query speed is 36.84% higher than that of the traditional centralization method; the predicate query speed is 31.58% higher than that of the traditional centralization method. The experimental results confirm that the semantic information exchange architecture based on the semantic knowledge framework is feasible, and it has excellent performance in terms of construction speed and query speed. Under the background that researchers rely more and more on collaborative technology to interact with other members, this paper has a certain reference value and exploration value and proposes a new idea of group collaboration system under the framework of semantic knowledge.

Aligning social concerns with information system security: A fundamental ontology for social engineering

Along with the rapid development of socio-technical systems, people are playing an increasingly important role in information system and have actually become an essential system component. However, unlike technology-based attacks that have been investigated for decades, social engineering attacks have not been efficiently addressed. In particular, due to the interdisciplinary nature of social engineering, there is a lack of consensus on its definition, hindering the further development of this research field. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive and fundamental ontology of social engineering based on a systematic review of existing social engineering taxonomies and ontologies in order to provide a theoretical foundation for social engineering analysis. The essential contributions of this paper include: (1) propose a comprehensive ontology of social engineering and precisely specify ontological definitions of its essential concepts based on Situation Calculus; (2) enumerate and summarize a set of social engineering techniques and present their fine-grained classification based on the proposed ontology; (3) incorporate psychology and sociology knowledge into social engineering analysis, encapsulating such knowledge in terms of a formalized ontology. We have evaluated our ontology based on a set of real social engineering attacks, the results of which show the usefulness of our proposal.

A Metamodel for Bridging Heterogeneous Ontologies

Soft ontologies aim to provide more flexible knowledge representations as compared with hierarchy-based ontology models. Soft ontologies can restructure itself according to the necessities of an interaction context. This is especially desirable in systems that need to deal with dynamic domains and situations with a high degree of uncertainty. However, the definition of soft ontologies is a challenging task due to the lack of generic and well defined components. In addition, such definition may suffer from problems with interoperability and integration with other models. We argue that soft ontologies should coexist with other models in an interoperable framework. In this paper, we propose and formalize a metamodel to provide adequate conciliation among various ontology representation approaches. We develop soft ontologies based on matrices of probabilities and apply a triplification process in which concepts are represented as fuzzy RDF statements. Our proposal was evaluated in a case study in an educational context, which uses a soft ontology to express a repertoire of actions in an mBot robot. The results indicate the feasibility of our fuzzy RDF approach to represent soft ontologies and the use of the metamodel to support interoperability in heterogeneous ontology networks.