Descriptive Ontology For Linguistic And Cognitive Engineering Research Articles

Resolving the “three-fit” problems in enterprise information systems: a design science approach with ontological solutions

PurposeAddressing integrity, flexibility and interoperability challenges in enterprise information systems (EISs) is often hindered by the “three-fit” barrier, which encompasses vertical, horizontal and transversal fit problems. To overcome these obstacles, we propose solutions aimed at defining the business view of EIS. This study addresses these issues by proposing solutions tailored to the business view of EIS. Specifically, it introduces the core ontology of sensitive business processes (COSBP), a conceptual framework designed to formalize and define the multidimensional dimensions of sensitive business processes (SBPs). By providing a unified structure of central concepts and semantic relationships, COSBP enhances both knowledge management (KM) and business process management (BPM) in organizational contexts.Design/methodology/approachThis paper adopts the design science research methodology covering the phases of a design-oriented research project that develops new artifacts, such as the COSBP ontology, based on SBP modeling requirements. Following a formal multi-level, multi-component approach, COSBP is structured into sub-ontologies across different abstraction levels. Built upon the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) foundational ontology, COSBP integrates and extends core concepts from core domain ontologies in business processes. The framework specifies six key modeling dimensions of SBPs – functional, organizational, behavioral, informational, intentional and knowledge – each represented as a distinct class of ontological modules (OMs).FindingsCOSBP offers a semantically rich and precise framework for modeling SBPs, addressing complexity and ambiguity in conceptual modeling. It supports the creation of expressive and effective SBP models while enabling consensus-driven representation at a generic level. Additionally, COSBP serves as a foundation for extending modeling notations and developing tools that align with these notations. Its application in enterprise environments improves the integration, adaptability and interoperability of EISs, ultimately enhancing organizational processes and decision-making.Originality/valueThe development of the COSBP ontology holds considerable potential for application in various industries beyond its original focus on business process management and KM. The ontology’s capability to semantically model sensitive, knowledge-intensive and dynamic processes can be extended to other real-life scenarios in other complex domains and sectors – for example, finance and banking, government and public services, insurance, manufacturing and supply chain management, retail, E-commerce, logistics and transportation crisis management, government and public services, higher education and so on. By integrating artificial intelligence (AI) with the COSBP ontology, we aim to enable more intelligent decision-making, process monitoring and improved management of SBPs in knowledge-driven domains.

Choosing the Sweet Life with DOLCE

An ontology in philosophy is a description of what exists; an ontology in information science is the formal specification of a domain for information organization. A top-level ontology is an ontology of high-level abstractions that is meant to provide a standard for other ontologies to make them interoperable. Top-level ontologies commit to certain philosophical assumptions in the worlds they model, such as naive scientific realism, or the choice to model only those worlds which “actually” exist. This paper uses a comparison of Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) to investigate whether naive scientific realism is useful as a philosophical stance in ontological modelling. It investigates the specific philosophical and technical features of DOLCE which make it unique. BFO and DOLCE are compared, as well as a miniature literature review of comparisons between other top-level ontologies. Then it describes the history of DOLCE and BFO’s development in the context of the collaboration between Barry Smith and Nicola Guarino. Finally, it examines the application of DOLCE in various domains, such as “sweetening” WordNet.

A time-indexed mereology for SUMO

While the period of time during which a subprocess occurs is precisely the time during which the part-whole relation with its main process takes place, part-whole relations between objects do not obey such a rule. The parts of an object can exist before the object is conformed as such, and can survive its dismantlement. In fact, there are no means for knowing when, during the existence of the part and the whole, their parthood relation holds unless an explicit account of time is represented. A time-indexed mereology characterizes how objects gain and lose parts over time by associating a time index to their part-whole relations. Keeping an account of when objects lose or gain parts is necessary for the correct representation of their spatial location and their participation in processes. Upper-level ontologies characterize the properties of the most basic, domain-independent entities, such as time, space, objects and processes. Two upper-level ontologies broadly used are The Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) and The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO). However, while DOLCE provides a first-order time-indexed mereology for structuring its entities over time, SUMO provides a weaker axiomatization that does not represent the rules that determine how the mereological structure of objects evolve through time in the real world. This work proposes a first-order logic time-indexed mereology for SUMO based on its current representation of objects, time, and temporal location, thereby characterizing how objects gain and lose parts over time. The proposed theory sets the stage for the development of a time-indexed theory of spatial location, and for the representation of temporal restrictions on the participation of objects in processes. The time-indexed mereology of DOLCE and the proposed theory are formally compared, and their relative strength established by using ontology mapping. In order to achieve such a comparison, the representations of time, and temporal location of both upper-level ontologies are also formally compared.

Applying Semantic Web Technologies to Provide Feasibility Feedback in Early Design Phases

In the product development process, as it is currently practiced, production is still often neglected in the early design phases, leading to late and costly changes. Using the knowledge of product designers concerning production process design, this paper introduces an ontological framework that enables early feasibility analyses. In this way, the number of iterations between product and process design can almost certainly be reduced, which would accelerate the product development process. Additionally, the approach provides process engineers with possible production sequences that can be used for process planning. To provide feasibility feedback, the approach presented relies on semantic web technologies. An ontology was developed that supports designers to model the relations among products, processes, and resources in a way that allows the use of generic Sparql Protocol And RDF Query Language (SPARQL) queries. Future applicability of this approach is ensured by aligning it with the top-level ontology Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE). We also compare the ontology’s universals to fundamental classes of existing knowledge bases from the manufacturing and the batch processing domains. This comparison demonstrates the approach’s domain-independent applicability. Two proofs of concept are described, one in the manufacturing domain and one in the batch processing domain.

COOP: A core ontology of organization’s processes for group decision making

New performance requirements to adapt to the changing environment and to maintain a competitive advantage have contributed since the 1980s to the emergence of new types of organizations focused on projects or processes. To facilitate the implementation of this process view of organizations, many theorists and practitioners have proposed analysis and modelling frameworks, ontologies being considered as a relevant tool to conduct a ‘semantic analysis’ of business processes. This analysis provides a referential of concepts defined through consensus between domain experts. These concepts should improve the commensurability of the interpretation schemas of the decision makers. Thus, in general, any decision-making process consists of four phases, which are: (1) intelligence, (2) design, (3) choice and (4) evaluation and revision. The ‘design’ phase is aimed at building a repository of concepts collected from the first phase. These concepts model the activity of the organization in terms of knowledge. This knowledge should be shared and adopted by the group decision makers in order to perform any collective decision. Approaches in this area are, however, based on ad hoc, often implicit modelling principles, and the proposed ontologies remain poor in terms of expressiveness. The objective of this paper is to analyse the ontological foundations of the processes of organizations following a formal approach. We propose a core ontology of organization processes which specializes the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) foundational ontology and supplementing Bottazzi and Ferrario’s DOLCE-based formal ontology of organizations. This ontology comprises several modules to reflect both the ‘static’ aspects of organizations and their behaviours, including intentional ones. In this article, we present the contents of the ontology, the formal ontological tools reused for its design, and the various theories the ontology is committed to.

Reexamining fiat, bona fide and force dynamic boundaries for geopolitical entities and their placement in DOLCE

The purpose of this article is to reexamine the ontology of geopolitical boundaries so that they can be better represented in ontologies designed for the semantic web. Previous work on this subject has divided geopolitical boundaries into fiat, bona fide, and force dynamic categories. This article challenges the existence of bona fide geopolitical boundaries on the basis that many of them lie skew to physical discontinuities on the earth, maritime territorial claims do not follow physical discontinuities, and geopolitical boundaries are three-dimensional, not two-dimensional objects. This also allows for a necessary ontological distinction to be made between the geopolitical boundaries and their physical markers. This analysis is used to determine the placement of geopolitical boundaries, territory, states, and nations in the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE). DOLCE has a cognitive bias making it particularly suitable for formulating an ontology of mind-dependent geopolitical entities. However, rather than distinguishing between the physical and nonphysical based on whether or not the entity in question has direct spatial qualities, this article puts forward that a distinction needs to be made based on whether or not an entity in question is made of matter. A material/immaterial distinction may be more intuitive for an ontology of “common sense”.

Semantic-Driven e-Government: Application of Uschold and King Ontology Building Methodology for Semantic Ontology Models Development

Electronic government (e-government) has been one of the most active areas of ontology development during the past six years. In e-government, ontologies are being used to describe and specify e-government services (e-services) because they enable easy composition, matching, mapping and merging of various e-government services. More importantly, they also facilitate the semantic integration and interoperability of e-government services. However, it is still unclear in the current literature how an existing ontology building methodology can be applied to develop semantic ontology models in a government service domain. In this paper the Uschold and King ontology building methodology is applied to develop semantic ontology models in a government service domain. Firstly, the Uschold and King methodology is presented, discussed and applied to build a government domain ontology. Secondly, the domain ontology is evaluated for semantic consistency using its semi-formal representation in Description Logic. Thirdly, an alignment of the domain ontology with the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) upper level ontology is drawn to allow its wider visibility and facilitate its integration with existing metadata standard. Finally, the domain ontology is formally written in Web Ontology Language (OWL) to enable its automatic processing by computers. The study aims to provide direction for the application of existing ontology building methodologies in the Semantic Web development processes of e-government domain specific ontology models; which would enable their repeatability in other e-government projects and strengthen the adoption of semantic technologies in e-government.

A Theory of Social Agentivity and its Integration into the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering

The agentivity of social entities has posed problems for ontologies of social phenomena, especially in the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) designed for use in the semantic web. This article elucidates a theory by which physical and social objects can take action, but that also recognizes the different ways in which they act. It introduces the “carry” relationship, through which social actions can occur when a physical action is taken in the correct circumstances. For example, the physical action of a wave of a hand may carry the social action of saying hello when entering a room. This article shows how a system can simultaneously and in a noncontradictory manner handle statements and queries in which both nonphysical social agents and physical agents take action by the carry relationship and the use of representatives. A revision of DOLCE’s taxonomic structure of perdurants is also proposed. This revision divides perdurants into physical and nonphysical varieties at the same ontological level at which endurants are so divided.

A Theory of Social Agentivity and its Integration into the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering

The agentivity of social entities has posed problems for ontologies of social phenomena, especially in the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) designed for use in the semantic web. This article elucidates a theory by which physical and social objects can take action, but that also recognizes the different ways in which they act. It introduces the “carry” relationship, through which social actions can occur when a physical action is taken in the correct circumstances. For example, the physical action of a wave of a hand may carry the social action of saying hello when entering a room. This article shows how a system can simultaneously and in a noncontradictory manner handle statements and queries in which both nonphysical social agents and physical agents take action by the carry relationship and the use of representatives. A revision of DOLCE’s taxonomic structure of perdurants is also proposed. This revision divides perdurants into physical and nonphysical varieties at the same ontological level at which endurants are so divided.Request access from your librarian to read this article's full text.

Preliminaries to a DOLCE ontology of organisations

This paper presents a preliminary proposal of an ontology of organisations based on descriptive ontology for linguistic and cognitive engineering (DOLCE). An ontological analysis of organisations is the first, fundamental and ineliminable pillar on which to build a precise and rigorous enterprise modelling. An ontological analysis makes explicit the social structure that underlies every organisational settings. In particular, the paper tries to explain what are organisations, roles and norms, how they are interrelated, what it means for a norm to be valid in an organisation and what it means for an agent to be affiliated to an organisation.