Instances Of Concepts Research Articles

The Irony of Law

John Finnis says that central cases of the concepts of social theory (such as the concept of law) fully instantiate values. Yet the instances of some such concepts (such as the concepts of slavery, of tyranny, and of murder) do not instantiate any value. I propose (and this is consistent with Finnis’s insight) that the central cases of such concepts fully instantiate certain ills. The central case of a concept essential to social theory may excel in some good or in some ill, or in neither, or in both. What about law? The central cases of a legal system, or of a law, do indeed involve goods that Finnis ascribes to them; the central cases also involve certain ills. That is the irony of law. Law secures essential goods for a community, and it incurs certain ills that are necessarily involved in its specific techniques for securing those goods. The irony is not just a theoretical tension; it works itself into a tension, which I try to explain, over a legal system’s regulation of the validity of its own particular legal norms.

Towards conceptual foundations for service-oriented requirements engineering: bridging requirements and services ontologies

The engineering of a service-oriented system requires the specification of functions that Web services (WSs) should provide, before WSs are built or selected. Written in a service description language, the service specification instantiates concepts different than those used for requirement engineering (RE): the former speaks in terms of operations, metrics and bindings, whereas the latter manipulates, goals, evaluations and domain assumptions. It is, however, clear that functions expected of WSs to select or build will be relevant to the stakeholders if they satisfy the stakeholders' requirements. As a result, there is a gap between the two specifications which must be bridged in order to ensure that the WS system is adequate w.r.t. requirements. This study proposes mappings between the concepts of requirements ontology and those of service taxonomy induced by the WSLD and the WSLA languages. A working prototype is presented that implements the mappings and is used to translate the instances of RE concepts into instances of WSLD and WSLA concepts. The mappings and the prototype facilitate the engineering of WS systems, as fragments of WS descriptions can be generated from requirements as a first specification of a service request.

An Empirical Investigation on the Use of Buffers and Incentives in Non-Hierarchical Networks

Delivery reliability has shifted from being an order winner to being an order qualifier in many industrial and service sectors. Thus, companies are forced to take into consideration all the aspects that might impact on such an indicator. This paper focuses on the European machinery and equipment industry, an important instance of the non-hierarchical network concept, to investigate the relationships existing among supply-side uncertainty, delivery reliability to the final market and the adoption of possible leverages to mitigate problems, namely buffers and incentives. The authors formulate the research hypotheses and test them against a set of collected data in 3 European countries. The final discussion about the results provides insights about the real effectiveness of buffer and incentive based approaches, as well as some directions for future research.

Mental models of Boolean concepts

Negation, conjunction, and disjunction are major building blocks in the formation of concepts. This article presents a new model-based theory of these Boolean components. It predicts that individuals simplify the models of instances of concepts. Evidence corroborates the theory and challenges alternative accounts, such as those based on minimal descriptions, algebraic complexity, or structural invariance. A computer program implementing the theory yields more accurate predictions than these rival accounts. Two experiments showed that the numbers of models of a Boolean concept predict the difficulty of formulating a description of it. As mental models may also underlie deductive reasoning, the present theory integrates two hitherto separate areas of investigation.

Semi-Automatic Ontology Construction by Exploiting Functional Dependencies and Association Rules

This paper presents a novel semi-automatic approach to construct conceptual ontologies over structured data by exploiting both the schema and content of the input dataset. It effectively combines two well-founded database and data mining techniques, i.e., functional dependency discovery and association rule mining, to support domain experts in the construction of meaningful ontologies, tailored to the analyzed data, by using Description Logic (DL). To this aim, functional dependencies are first discovered to highlight valuable conceptual relationships among attributes of the data schema (i.e., among concepts). The set of discovered correlations effectively support analysts in the assertion of the Tbox ontological statements (i.e., the statements involving shared data conceptualizations and their relationships). Then, the analyst-validated dependencies are exploited to drive the association rule mining process. Association rules represent relevant and hidden correlations among data content and they are used to provide valuable knowledge at the instance level. The pushing of functional dependency constraints into the rule mining process allows analysts to look into and exploit only the most significant data item recurrences in the assertion of the Abox ontological statements (i.e., the statements involving concept instances and their relationships).

Semantic Web and Knowledge Management in User Data Privacy

This paper discusses knowledge representation for privacy and accountability issues. Use of personal information from customers is a common practice among companies and governments around the world. Knowing and applying current privacy legislation is an important requirement for IT projects. Inadequate procedures or data breaches can lead to lawsuits and loss of consumer trust for the company [1]. IT project managers are mainly aware of their business goals, but not of specific required actions to assure that the project is privacy-compliant. Security systems are designed to protect data from unauthorized access. On the other hand, privacy systems must empower the user providing control for its own data and limiting access to it. Slightly different from these two approaches there is the perspective of organizations over client data privacy. The main concern on privacy accountability is to handle personal identifiable information in a secure way avoiding misuse. Examples of previous work in this domain are the Rei [2] and DAML Privacy [3] ontologies. This paper 3 illustrates how ontologies can be used to model the mapping of intended actions into corresponding required actions in order to comply with privacy regulations. To this, our modeling approach uses OWL-DL [4]. In our proposed model we refer to agents and targets, similarly to Breaux and Anton [5]. An agent is the accountable part that performs “intended actions” and a target is any object that suffers or is involved in a performed intended action. Under certain specific conditions of each particular intended action, the agent will need to take other actions to be compliant with the privacy policy, which are named “required actions”. As an example consider an organization planning to transfer personal data to another country. In this case the intended action is a transborder data flow. For this kind of action 1 Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio Grande do Sul – PUCRS. {douglas.silva,mirian.bruckschen,paulo.bridi,roger.granada}@cpph.pucr s.br, {alexandre.agustini, renata.vieira}@pucrs.br 2 Hewlett-Packard – HP. {caio.northfleet, prasad.rao, tomas.sander}@hp.com 3 This paper was achieved in cooperation with Hewlett-Packard Brasil Ltda. using incentives of Brazilian Informatics Law (Law no 8.2.48 of 1991). Semantic Web and Knowledge Management in User Data Privacy 70 RITA • Volume XVI • Numero 2 • 2009 specific regulations apply in the European Union (EU). There are three possible cases: i) the destination country is considered adequate by the EU; ii) the destination country has a special agreement with the EU; iii) or the destination country is considered non adequate by the EU. In the special agreement case, illustrated here, it is necessary to verify if the target company has signed the special agreement. Next, an ontology excerpt that models this restriction is presented: Figure 1. OWL-DL concepts and properties modeling a subset of the privacy domain. Instances of concepts presented in Figure 1 given as an example of transborder data flow are: Organization X, Subsidiary Y, EU, Spain, USA and Safe Harbor. They are instances of Agent, Target, Geo and Agreement, respectively. In the example, Organization X is located in Spain, Subsidiary Y is located in USA and Organization X performs a transborder data flow to Subsidiary Y. Also, USA has a Safe Harbor agreement, which is an agreement with EU. Having these assertions in the ontology, some inferences can be made: Safe Harbor is classified as an EU Agreement and USA is inferred as EU Non Adequate with Agreement. The required action for case (ii) is defined by a rule. It states that if an agent located in the EU performs a transborder data flow to a non adequate country with agreement then the agent must ensure that the target has signed the agreement. In our future work, we plan to develop a model for privacy assessment as a way to guide managers on being compliant with customers’ data privacy.

Learning subsumption hierarchies of ontology concepts from texts

Abstract. This paper proposes a method for learning ontologies given a corpus of text documents. The method identifies conceptsin documents and organizes them into a subsumption hierarchy, without presupposing the existence of a seed ontology. Themethod uncovers latent topics for generating document text. The discovered topics form the concepts of the new ontology.Concept discovery is done in a language neutral way, using probabilistic space reduction techniques over the original term spaceof the corpus. Furthermore, the proposed method constructs a subsumption hierarchy of the concepts by performing conditionalindependence tests among pairs of latent topics, given a third one. The paper provides experimental results on the Genia and theLonely Planet corpora from the domains of molecular biology and tourism respectively.Keywords: Ontology Learning, Concept Discovery, Subsumption Hierarchy Construction, Latent Dirichlet Allocation, ConditionalIndependence 1. IntroductionOntologies have been proposed as the key ele-ment to shape, manage and further process knowledge.However, the engineering of ontologies is a costly,time-consuming and error-prone task when done man-ually. Furthermore, in quickly evolving domains ofknowledge, or in cases where information is constantlybeing updated, possibly making prior knowledge obso-lete, the continuous maintenance and evolution of on-tologies are tasks that require significant human effort.Thus, there is a strong need to automate the ontologydevelopment/maintenance tasks in order to minimizethe cost of ontology creation and evolution.For this reason, ontology learning has emerged as afield of research, aiming to help knowledge engineersto build and further extend ontologies with the help ofautomated or semi-automated machine learning tech-niques, exploiting several sources of information. On-tology learning is commonly viewed ([1], [10], [30],[35]) as the task of extending or enriching an exist-ing ontology with new ontology elements mined fromtext corpora. Depending on the ontology elements be-ing discovered, existing approaches deal with the iden-tification of concepts, subsumption relations amongconcepts, instances of concepts, or concept proper-ties/relations. Linguistic, statistical, or machine learn-ing techniques are used for these tasks.The seed ontology used in ontology enrichmentis usually a hierarchical backbone of concepts, re-lated via subsumption relations, or a generic ontologythat formalizes some of the concepts in a documentcollection. Linguistic approaches additionally sufferfrom language dependence, as they rely on language-specific lexico-syntactic patterns.In contrast to the majority of the existing work, thispaper proposes an automated approach to ontologylearning, without presupposing the existence of a seedontology, or any other type of external resource, exceptthe corpus of training text documents. The proposed

The Law without Organs

The Law without Organs Simon Scott (bio) Alexandre Lefebvre. The Image of Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza. Palo Alto CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. US$70.00 (hardcover); US$27.95 (paper), 336 pages. ISBN- 10 0804759847; ISBN- 13 978-0804759847 Alexandre Lefebvre’s The Image of Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza is the first book-length study to use the thought of Gilles Deleuze in developing a theory of adjudication. That Deleuze said little about jurisprudence, and was highly critical of human rights discourses, is not in itself a problem for this is not a book on Deleuze. Indeed, only one section is devoted entirely to him and the book’s three parts are mediated through Kant, Bergson and Spinoza respectively. Lefebvre challenges the notion that judges simply apply the law, and works with Deleuze’s concepts to advance a concept of judgment and adjudication that is inherently creative. To put it more forcefully, Deleuze’s philosophy offers an affirmative insight into how judges create the law, in which creativity is thought of as a condition of judgment. Only with this insight, Lefebvre argues, can adjudication be properly understood and practiced. In contrast to much Deleuzian scholarship, which focuses on the radical nature of Deleuze’s thought, Lefebvre wishes “to achieve a certain tone with Deleuze by bringing him to everyday institutional concerns and giving his concepts more sober application than is often the case” (xiii). An “image” of thought, according to Deleuze, is the prephilosophical image we have of what it means to think. We make certain assumptions, for example that thought is equal to truth and that thinking is an activity of recognizing objects as instances of pre-existing concepts. The main problem with this ‘dogmatic’ image of thought is that these assumptions, which are uncritically accepted as the natural capacity for thinking, base thought on accepted opinion. Lefebvre extends this concept in Part One to write about the ‘dogmatic image of law’. This refers to the uncritical acceptance in theories of adjudication of the Kantian notion of judgment as a subsumptive activity: legal cases are recognized as instances of pre-existing rules of law. As rules pre-exist cases, they determine how an event appears before a judge as a legal case. Lefebvre presents the dogmatic image of law through three theorists: H.L.A. Hart, Ronald Dworkin and Jürgen Habermas. In each case, they are shown to criticize simple accounts of judgment as subsumption and seek to provide a more adequate explanation. But what they have in common, and which makes their image of law dogmatic, is that none of them consider that judgment could be anything other than subsumptive. Hart’s judge appears like the Kantian schemata, synthesizing cases and laws immanently, but within laws themselves. Dworkin’s judge reflectively presupposes purposes as if they were present in a law’s creation, and his interpretation of the law is treated as the latest chapter in an ongoing narrative. For Habermas, judgments are formed discursively and retrospectively to ‘discover’ an appropriate norm, an appropriateness that is determined retrospectively. Lefebvre teases out the Kantian nature of subsumptive judgment in each theorist: subsumption from the Critique of Pure Reason in Hart; reflective teleological judgment from the Critique of Judgment in Dworkin; and the philosophy of law from the Metaphysics of Morals in Habermas. Of course, a pre-existing rule cannot match a case exactly, giving rise to a judge’s interpretation and therefore an amendment in the law. But the terms of the judgment have already been established, and what is new and singular about a case is overlooked. Creativity is understood as either the willful or accidental intervention by a judge. Parts Two and Three, which are worked through Bergson and Spinoza (and Deleuze’s readings of them), present a new image of law as creative. Opening with a discussion of Aristotle and Kant, Lefebvre introduces Deleuze’s concept of the encounter, which is nothing less than the real condition of thought: “According to Deleuze, only an unanticipated and violent encounter can stimulate thought past the purview of recognition and force it to think” (72). One does not encounter the new; the encounter is the relation between...

Extracting Know-Who/Know-How Using Development Project-Related Taxonomies

Product developers frequently discuss topics related to their development project with others, but often use technical terms whose meanings are not clear to non-specialists. To provide non-experts with precise and comprehensive understanding of the know-who/know-how being discussed, the method proposed herein categorizes the messages using a taxonomy of the products being developed and a taxonomy of tasks relevant to those products. The instances in the taxonomy are products and/or tasks manually selected as relevant to system development. The concepts are defined by the taxonomy of instances. That proposed method first extracts phrases from discussion logs as data-driven instances relevant to system development. It then classifies those phrases to the concepts defined by taxonomy experts. The innovative feature of our method is that in classifying a phrase to a concept, say C, the method considers the associations of the phrase with not only the instances of C, but also with the instances of the neighbor concepts of C (neighbor is defined by the taxonomy). This approach is quite accurate in classifying phrases to concepts; the phrase is classified to C, not the neighbors of C, even though they are quite similar to C. Next, we attach a data-driven concept to C; the data-driven concept includes instances in C and a classified phrase as a data-driven instance. We analyze know-who and know-how by using not only human-defined concepts but also those data-driven concepts. We evaluate our method using the mailing-list of an actual project. It could classify phrases with twice the accuracy possible with the TF/iDF method, which does not consider the neighboring concepts. The taxonomy with data-driven concepts provides more detailed know-who/know-how than can be obtained from just the human-defined concepts themselves or from the data-driven concepts as determined by the TF/iDF method.

Cyberwar and the Russian Federation: the usual suspect

The evolution of the technology and the changes in the organisation and control of the critical infrastructures of nations are creating a new combat front. The cases studied in this paper are related to the attack to the information systems and services of Estonia, in April 2007, and Georgia, in August 2008, occurring at the same time as the conventional military operation executed by the Russian Federation's army in the South Ossetia. The Russian Federation has been repeatedly accused of this operations, but the data collected raises doubts and in the second case-study showed the existence of a poorly organised network, related to Russian criminal organisations, supporting the possibility of this being an instance of the Maoist concept of the 'People's war'. This paper will also show that, despite the unsophisticated resources used in most of the attacks and to promote them, the damages in the selected targets were considerable.

ALC + T: a Preferential Extension of Description Logics

We extend the Description Logic ALC with a operator T that allows us to reason about the prototypical properties and inheritance with exceptions. The resulting logic is called ALC + T. The typicality operator is intended to select the most normal or most instances of a concept. In our framework, knowledge bases may then contain, in addition to ordinary ABoxes and TBoxes, subsumption relations of the form T(C) is subsumed by P, expressing that typical C-members have the property P. The semantics of a typicality operator is defined by a set of postulates that are strongly related to Kraus-Lehmann-Magidor axioms of preferential logic P. We first show that T enjoys a simple semantics provided by ordinary structures equipped with a preference relation. This allows us to obtain a modal interpretation of the typicality operator. We show that the satisfiability of anALC+Tknowledge base is decidable and it is precisely EXPTIME. We then present a tableau calculus for deciding satisfiability of ALC + T knowledge bases. Our calculus gives a (suboptimal) nondeterministic-exponential time decision procedure for ALC + T. We finally discuss how to extend ALC + T in order to infer defeasible properties of (explicit or implicit) individuals. We propose two alternatives: (i) a nonmonotonic completion of a knowledge base; (ii) a model semantics for ALC + T whose intuition is that minimal models are those that maximise typical instances of concepts.

NEOPLATONIC THOUGHT IN MEDIEVAL IRELAND: THE EVIDENCE OF "SCÉLA NA ESÉRGI"

Mvum Essay Prize 2009Seek na esergi is a Middle Irish sermon on universal resurrection, extant only in the late eleventh- or early twelfth-century vernacular manuscript Leborna hUidre) The first half of the text, with its focus on the materiality of resurrection and, in particular, its discussion of exceptional cases - miscarried foetuses, conjoined twins, those with congenital deformities, and so on - locates it within a literary genre that was common throughout medieval Christendom.2 Thus, even at its most basic level, the text is a witness to Ireland's extensive engagement with non-Irish textual culture in the Middle Ages. It has, however, been largely overlooked by scholars, and the characterization of Scela na esergi as 'not particularly original nor particularly Irish', and by extension undeserving of attention, epitomizes scholarly approaches (or the lack thereof) to the text.3 I would dispute this characterization by McNamara on both counts, and the purpose of the present study is to demonstrate that, while the text can certainly be read within a wider generic tradition, it is also a highly original composition. I suggest that one of the most important aspects of the text's originality is the author's manipulation of the Irish language to express complex concepts deriving from Latin theological and philosophical discourse. Indeed, the complexity of Scela na esergi is most impressively revealed in the author's use of the language and philosophy of Christian Neoplatonism, and it is this aspect of the text that will form the primary focus of my study. First, I will examine briefly the overarching Neoplatonic structure of the text; then I will explore in more detail some specific instances of Neoplatonic concepts being transposed from Latin into the vernacular. I end by discussing the implications for our understanding of Ireland's engagement with European intellectual culture in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.StructureStructurally, Scela na esergi takes the form of a Neoplatonic ascent from matter to form to the divine (see Figure 1). It is within this overarching structure that smaller thematic units emerge. The text begins with a formulaic hortatory opening, which serves to inform the audience that the theme of the text is the universal resurrection at Judgement Day. It is immethately clear that, although the author's primary concern is with those destined for heaven, he is interested in their imperfections and irregularities. The author begins with irregular deaths: those who have drowned, or been destroyed by fire, or consumed by animals. From here, he moves to miscarried foetuses. The foetus is a bridge between the irregular death (it has not experienced life outside the uterus) and the subsequent theme, the irregular body (the foetus finds itself embothed in a manner that does not resemble the ideal human 'form', in the likeness of which mankind will be resurrected). The theme of irregular bothes encompasses a thscussion of the deformed, midgets, and the obese. The climax of this section is the thscussion of the wounds of the martyrs; the most perfect physical imperfection.Next the author sets up the theme of man as a microcosm of the universe, and this is an aspect of the text that I will address in more detail below. At this point, the author curbs his philosophical speculation and expresses the importance of scriptural ortliodoxy, before beginning a new section of the text which deals with the retention of gender thfferences following the Resurrection. Raising the issue of gender thfferences leads the author to weigh up the arguments for the physicality of the resurrected body. Specifically, he attempts to resolve satisfactorily the doctrine of physical resurrection with the Pauline notion of the 'spiritual' resurrection. This thsputatio on material and spiritual notions of resurrection is the point at which SceL· na esergi moves away from the issues of physicality which have dominated the first half of the text, toward the spiritual concerns which dominate the second. …

Modelling and simulating work practices in agriculture

Research has shown that the managerial capacities and work practices of farmers play a major role in explaining differences in economic and environmental performances. This paper presents a computer simulation framework that enables work organisation issues in agricultural production systems to be studied. This framework relies on a purposive frame-based ontology of such production systems. The paper focuses on a subpart of the ontology that concerns production activities, flexible plans and material resources. The paper also outlines the interpretation algorithms that operate on instances of these ontology concepts in any production system model constructed in compliance with the ontology.

Accessing Kant: A Relaxed Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason (review)

Reviewed by: Accessing Kant: A Relaxed Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason Eric Entrican Wilson Jay F. Rosenberg. Accessing Kant: A Relaxed Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. Pp. xi + 312. Paper, $29.95. In the Preface to his impressive and engaging new commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason, Jay Rosenberg informs us that the book is both a product of his own lectures and a “direct descendent of Wilfrid Sellars’ legendary introduction to Kant” (vi). Its origins in the classroom give Accessing Kant a refreshingly pedagogical tone. Throughout, Rosen-berg—who was a student of Sellars’ at the University of Pittsburgh—makes felicitous use of clear examples, familiar problems and authors, and visual aids to clarify “the Big Picture” operating in the first Critique. Mercifully, however, his style owes little to Sellars’ own brutally opaque prose. Rosenberg also shares his teacher’s enthusiasm for the history of philosophy. The reader will not find Rosenberg sloughing off Kant’s “lesser predecessors” in the manner of P. F. Strawson. However, the history on display in Accessing Kant has more to do with the curricular demands of English-speaking philosophy departments than with Kant’s own intellectual and cultural context. This means that his Kant argues across the ages with giants rather than with his peers in Halle and Berlin. Nor, despite the occasional reference to Kant’s handwritten marginalia, does Rosenberg devote any effort to tracing the internal development of Kant’s thought. He does not consider whether insight might be gained from looking at particular problems in the light of the Dissertation (1770), for example, or of Kant’s polemics against Eberhard in On a Discovery (1790). The Prolegomena gets described as “not particularly helpful for understanding the First Critique, especially the difficult bits” (3n). Yet Rosenberg’s “whirlwind tour of the history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics through Hume” (10) is sophisticated and compelling, despite its brevity and “relaxed” style. Tough-minded historicists may resist the idea that Kant’s question, “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” is just another version of the “Pythagorean puzzle” regarding the mathematical intelligibility of the physical world. But if one grants the reasonable assumption that important philosophical work often transcends the context of its production, one will appreciate the concision of his historical discussions as well as the lack of clutter. The substantive claims Rosenberg makes about the first Critique register his Sellarsian heritage as well. He finds Kant responding most directly to the problems of Hume’s “Concept Empiricism,” rather than, say, his skepticism. Kant is concerned to show that empiricist theories cannot explain either the coherence of perceptual experience (our ability to perceive particulars as instances of universals) or the legitimacy of the synthetic a priori judgments (which Rosenberg calls “every-must judgments”) that underwrite our cognitive practices. According to Rosenberg, Kant’s solution to the problems of Concept Empiricism stems from the commitments expressed in his claim that “the same function that gives unity to the various representations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition” (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B104–05). Particularly important here are two main ideas. One is that possession of a concept amounts to possession of the ability to apply it in a judgment. Concepts “rest on” those functions of the understanding that supply propositional form. The other is that the ability to intuit particular items in space (and time) requires the ability to draw on concepts. Thus, to perceive something as an instance of a general concept (as a chair, for example) is to have an experience whose content can be articulated in the form of a judgment. This reading implies that the distinction between spontaneity and receptivity does not neatly parallel the distinction between understanding and sensibility. It is not merely that concepts must combine with intuitions in order to yield cognition, but that the capacity to intuit must already involve the understanding (qua “faculty of rules”). Properly understood, these ideas provide the key to understanding the central claims of the Transcendental Analytic. Rosenberg’s admirable reconstruction of this difficult line of thought is the heart of...

On Instance-level Update and Erasure in Description Logic Ontologies

A Description Logic (DL) ontology is constituted by two components, a TBox that expresses general knowledge about the concepts and their relationships, and an ABox that describes the properties of individuals that are instances of concepts. We address the problem of how to deal with changes to a DL ontology, when these changes affect only the ABox, i.e. when the TBox is considered invariant. We consider two basic changes, namely instance-level update and instance-level erasure, roughly corresponding to the addition and the deletion of a set of facts involving individuals. We characterize the semantics of instance-level update and erasure on the basis of the approaches proposed by Winslett and by Katsuno and Mendelzon. Interestingly, DLs are typically not closed with respect to instance-level update and erasure, in the sense that the set of models corresponding to the application of any of these operations to a knowledge base in a DL L may not be expressible by ABoxes in L⁠. In particular, we show that this is true for DL-LiteF⁠, a tractable DL that is oriented towards data-intensive applications. To deal with this problem, we first introduce DL-LiteFS⁠, a DL that minimally extends DL-LiteF and is closed with respect to instance-level update, and present a polynomial algorithm for computing instance-level update in this logic. Then, we provide a principled notion of best approximation with respect to a fixed language L of instance-level update and erasure, and exploit the algorithm for instance-level update for DL-LiteFS to get polynomial algorithms for approximated instance-level update and erasure for DL-LiteF⁠. These results confirm the nice computational properties of DL-LiteF for data intensive applications, even where information about instances is not only read, but also written.

Automated Semantic Analysis of Schematic Data

Content in numerous Web data sources, designed primarily for human consumption, are not directly amenable to machine processing. Automated semantic analysis of such content facilitates their transformation into machine-processable and richly structured semantically annotated data. This paper describes a learning-based technique for semantic analysis of schematic data which are characterized by being template-generated from backend databases. Starting with a seed set of hand-labeled instances of semantic concepts in a set of Web pages, the technique learns statistical models of these concepts using light-weight content features. These models direct the annotation of diverse Web pages possessing similar content semantics. The principles behind the technique find application in information retrieval and extraction problems. Focused Web browsing activities require only selective fragments of particular Web pages but are often performed using bookmarks which fetch the contents of the entire page. This results in information overload for users of constrained interaction modality devices such as small-screen handheld devices. Fine-grained information extraction from Web pages, which are typically performed using page specific and syntactic expressions known as wrappers, suffer from lack of scalability and robustness. We report on the application of our technique in developing semantic bookmarks for retrieving targeted browsing content and semantic wrappers for robust and scalable information extraction from Web pages sharing a semantic domain.

The Idea of Practice and Why It Matters in the Teaching of Preaching

Abstract. The concept of practice helps us better understand how preaching works, as well as how we can teach that practice more effectively. This essay develops a compact but wide‐ranging view of practices, reflecting the current scholarly discussion. It also argues that preaching is a particular instance of this larger concept of practices. Understanding preaching as a practice gives new perspectives on what preaching is and allows us to consider how to employ broadly recognized standards of excellence to evaluate particular instances of students’ preaching. Further, this essay explores how the teaching of preaching is a practice in its own right. The value of this insight is that it allows us then to explore how the character of the teaching and the character of what is taught can be consonant with one another, and in ways that can guide. This essay is from “Teaching Preaching as a Christian Practice,” edited by Thomas G. Long and Nora Tisdale. Used by permission of Westminster John Knox Press.

Expressive probabilistic description logics

The work in this paper is directed towards sophisticated formalisms for reasoning under probabilistic uncertainty in ontologies in the Semantic Web. Ontologies play a central role in the development of the Semantic Web, since they provide a precise definition of shared terms in web resources. They are expressed in the standardized web ontology language OWL, which consists of the three increasingly expressive sublanguages OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full. The sublanguages OWL Lite and OWL DL have a formal semantics and a reasoning support through a mapping to the expressive description logics SHIF ( D ) and SHOIN ( D ) , respectively. In this paper, we present the expressive probabilistic description logics P- SHIF ( D ) and P- SHOIN ( D ) , which are probabilistic extensions of these description logics. They allow for expressing rich terminological probabilistic knowledge about concepts and roles as well as assertional probabilistic knowledge about instances of concepts and roles. They are semantically based on the notion of probabilistic lexicographic entailment from probabilistic default reasoning, which naturally interprets this terminological and assertional probabilistic knowledge as knowledge about random and concrete instances, respectively. As an important additional feature, they also allow for expressing terminological default knowledge, which is semantically interpreted as in Lehmann's lexicographic entailment in default reasoning from conditional knowledge bases. Another important feature of this extension of SHIF ( D ) and SHOIN ( D ) by probabilistic uncertainty is that it can be applied to other classical description logics as well. We then present sound and complete algorithms for the main reasoning problems in the new probabilistic description logics, which are based on reductions to reasoning in their classical counterparts, and to solving linear optimization problems. In particular, this shows the important result that reasoning in the new probabilistic description logics is decidable/computable. Furthermore, we also analyze the computational complexity of the main reasoning problems in the new probabilistic description logics in the general as well as restricted cases.

Interpreted consultations as ‘business as usual’? An analysis of organisational routines in general practices

UK general practices operate in an environment of high linguistic diversity, because of recent large-scale immigration and of the NHS's commitment to provide a professional interpreter to any patient if needed. Much activity in general practice is co-ordinated and patterned into organisational routines (defined as repeated patterns of interdependent actions, involving multiple actors, bound by rules and customs) that tend to be stable and to persist. If we want to understand how general practices are responding to pressures to develop new routines, such as interpreted consultations, we need to understand how existing organisational routines change. This will then help us to address a second question, which is how the interpreted consultation itself is being enacted and changing as it becomes routinised (or not) in everyday general practice. In seeking answers to these two questions, we undertook a qualitative study of narratives of interpreted primary care consultations in three London boroughs with large minority ethnic populations. In 69 individual interviews and two focus groups, we sought accounts of interpreted consultations from service users, professional interpreters, family member interpreters, general practitioners, practice nurses, receptionists, and practice managers. We asked participants to tell us both positive and negative stories of their experiences. We analysed these data by searching for instances of concepts relating to the organisational routine, the meaning of the interpreted consultation to the practice, and the sociology of medical work. Our findings identified a number of general properties of the interpreted consultation as an organisational routine, including the wide variation in the form of adoption, the stability of the routine, the adaptability of the routine, and the strength of the routine. Our second key finding was that this variation could be partly explained by characteristics of the practice as an organisation, especially whether it was traditional (small, family-run, 'personal' identity, typically multilingual, loose division of labour, relatively insular) or contemporary (large, bureaucratic, 'efficient' identity, typically monolingual, clear division of labour, richly networked). We conclude that there is a fruitful research agenda to be explored that links the organisational dimension of interpreting services with studies of clinical care and outcomes.

Relational concept discovery in structured datasets

Relational datasets, i.e., datasets in which individuals are described both by their own features and by their relations to other individuals, arise from various sources such as databases, both relational and object-oriented, knowledge bases, or software models, e.g., UML class diagrams. When processing such complex datasets, it is of prime importance for an analysis tool to hold as much as possible to the initial format so that the semantics is preserved and the interpretation of the final results eased. Therefore, several attempts have been made to introduce relations into the formal concept analysis field which otherwise generated a large number of knowledge discovery methods and tools. However, the proposed approaches invariably look at relations as an intra-concept construct, typically relating two parts of the concept description, and therefore can only lead to the discovery of coarse-grained patterns. As an approach towards the discovery of finer-grain relational concepts, we propose to enhance the classical (object × attribute) data representations with a new dimension that is made out of inter-object links (e.g., spouse, friend, manager-of, etc.). Consequently, the discovered concepts are linked by relations which, like associations in conceptual data models such as the entity-relation diagrams, abstract from existing links between concept instances. The borders for the application of the relational mining task are provided by what we call a relational context family, a set of binary data tables representing individuals of various sorts (e.g., human beings, companies, vehicles, etc.) related by additional binary relations. As we impose no restrictions on the relations in the dataset, a major challenge is the processing of relational loops among data items. We present a method for constructing concepts on top of circular descriptions which is based on an iterative approximation of the final solution. The underlying construction methods are illustrated through their application to the restructuring of class hierarchies in object-oriented software engineering, which are described in UML.