Ontology Concepts Research Articles

The Problem of Understanding in Russian Idealism of the Late 19<sup>th</sup> and Early 20<sup>th</sup> Centuries: V.S. Solovyov and S.N. Trubetskoy

The paper examines the doctrine of understanding in Russian idealism from the late 19th to early 20th century. The author discusses the main ontological and epistemological concepts in the philosophy of V.S. Solovyov and his follower S.N. Trubetskoy. The paper offers a historical and philosophical reconstruction of the concept of understanding based on the analysis of V.S. Solovyov's Lectures on Divine Humanity and S.N. Trubetskoy's work On the Nature of Human Consciousness. According to Solovyov, the study of understanding is possible if we presume an unconditional principle that premises being as the One. Based on this premise, it is demonstrated that the unconditional principle allows to know everything without having knowledge of each subject separately, and this, in turn, is understanding process. Trubetskoy's theory of understanding is premised on the concept of soborny (gathered) mind, which defines mind as joint knowledge about all spheres of existence. The article shows that the main position shared by the Russian thinkers is the unconditional principle serving as the basis for life and mind without which the existence of either the universal or the particular is impossible. The author concludes that such a principle is a cognitive relation to the world, which unconditionality is the condition for understanding the reality as indivisible. Understanding, as presented by V.S. Solovyov and S.N. Trubetskoy, is the true understanding of the unity of existence in all its manifestations, that is, a synthesis of the sensual, rational, moral, and aesthetic.

Whose Life is it Anyway? Exploring the Social Relations of High-Conflict Divorce Cases in Southern Norway

The paper reports on findings from an empirical study based on qualitative interviews with Norwegian parents identified as part of a high-conflict divorce situation and interviews with caseworkers from a child welfare service. The site of study is an institutional circuit of concern, assessment, and referral involving the court, child welfare services, and a public family therapy service. The paper draws on the social ontology and analytic concepts of institutional ethnography and adopts parents’ standpoint to explore how their knowledge and experience are shaped through encounters with professionals in the process of being identified and assessed as a high-conflict divorce case. The focus on people’s doings and their expert knowledge about their doings sets institutional ethnographic research apart from more conventional forms of qualitative inquiry that focus on informants’ inner experience. The paper highlights how a generalized professional discourse seems to permeate the work that parents and caseworkers jointly engage in, sometimes subsuming the knowledge and experience of those involved. When the issues of life as subjectively known and experienced are different from those of the institutional discourse, there is a danger that what is important to those whose lives they concern escapes the dialogue between parents and professionals.

A Theoretical Approach For Developing A Semantic Analysis IIR Tool

An IIR (intelligent information retrieval) is a machine learning system used by users to retrieve the massive volume of information available through the internet. IIR offers personalization and efficiency in the current internet development allowing users to examine and acquire appropriate information. The paper will focus on the keyword searching issues of the current digital library system. The proposal is to choose a model that solves the issue using metadata case base and concept-based approach. The aim is to introduce a set of categories and concepts in the domain field that demonstrates some relations between them. As a result, poor quality of information retrieval in digital library system will be solved. The experiment has demonstrated that the already developed domain-specific ontology can be efficient for query advancement. Many researchers have used semantic retrieval technology using concepts to solve problems that lack semantics in traditional retrieval technology. Using concepts in ontology enhances search results.

La «conciencia práctica de sí mismo» según la trascendencia del Dasein

La tradición moderna ha situado en la inmanencia de la conciencia el lugar desde el que pensar cómo el sujeto se conoce a sí mismo, definiendo así una determinada ontología del yo. Por su parte, a finales de la segunda década del siglo XX Heidegger da cuenta de otra ontología del sí mismo en su interpretación de la «conciencia práctica de sí mismo» descrita por Kant, y según se manifiesta en el sentimiento de respeto de la personalitas moralis. Según sostenemos, la concepción ontológica de trascendencia del Dasein, elaborada por Heidegger al tiempo que estas interpretaciones de la filosofía kantiana —particularmente de la filosofía práctica, pero también de la razón pura— y en línea con la ontología del sí mismo de la existencia en Ser y tiempo, es el ámbito desde el que ha de interpretarse el fenómeno de la autocomprensión desvelado por Kant.

Named entity recognition for extracting concept in ontology building on Indonesian language using end-to-end bidirectional long short term memory

Information Extraction has been widely used to extract information from text. Named Entity Recognition (NER) is one of the primary tasks of Information Extraction to extract entities such as person, location, and organization. Extraction from text collection is essential to obtain information from unstructured text. Moreover, Named Entity Recognition is part of ontology building, which is the main objective of this research. Ontology can be built on the basis of a collection of concepts and relation between concepts. Concepts in ontology usually consist of a group of entities and are obtained using Noun Phrase Extraction or Named Entity Recognition. Our main focus in this research is to extract concepts in Ontology Building automatically using Named Entity Recognition. In this paper, Named Entity Recognition was chosen as our approach due to the lack of results from the previous Noun Phrase Extraction works, which is not all nouns obtained are entities. Our proposed methodology for Named Entity Recognition is applying an end-to-end model using Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (Bi-LSTM). Bi-LSTM is able to perform a sequence classification task by understanding the context of the input. Named Entity Recognition approaches in the previous study uses Part-of-Speech (POS) Tagging in the preprocessing phase by using other tools or models. This Part-of Speech is also used as a feature to improve the performance of Named Entity Recognition. Our proposed methodology provides an end-to-end system that can be used for both POS Tagging and Named Entity Recognition. By using our proposed end-to-end model, no additional tool is needed for Part-of-Speech Tagging. This the advantage of our model compared to other models. Experiments were conducted on news documents that were labeled with four types of entity classes and 35 types of part-of-speech. The target entities that we have extracted in this study are person, location, organization, and miscellaneous. We evaluated the performance of our model using F1-Score. We have achieved the best F1-Score for Part-of-Speech Tagging of 91.79% and Named Entity Recognition of 83.18%.

Slaughtering a cow in early childhood education: Pedagogic meetings with destruction as change

This article explores the concept of change in education through an examination of the entangled processes of destruction and creation made visible during a Norwegian kindergarten’s tradition of participating in a cow-slaughter in its local community. The article offers a methodological exploration, activating the theoretical perspectives of relational ontology, plasticity and critical animal studies. We present the event as a narrative and analyze it through these three perspectives, with special attention paid to unintentional change and change as an ontological concept. The discussion illuminates how children grasped destruction as change through creativity and play, and how ethical complexities are entangled with education, animal-based food production, traditions, play, and research.

Heidegger on the Unity of Metaphysics and the Method of Being and Time

The fundamental error of the metaphysical tradition, according to Heidegger, is the subordination of general ontology to the ontology of a special, exemplary entity (God, the soul, and so on). But Being and Time itself treats one kind of entity as exemplary, namely, Dasein. Does this mean that Heidegger fails to free himself from the kind of metaphysics that he sought to criticize? To show how he avoids this charge the author proposes to examine the parallels between the methodology of Being and Time and the methodology Heidegger ascribes to Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Heidegger takes the virtue of Aristotle’s inquiry to reside in the way he resists the subordination of general to special ontology: Aristotle was guided by a “double concept” of metaphysics, pursued two irreducibly distinct methods of inquiry, and avoided the temptation to unite them. In proposing to similarly pursue a “double task” in Being and Time Heidegger seeks to apply this insight to his own work. Alongside the task of fundamental ontology, Heidegger spells out the shape of a second task, Destruktion, understood as a historical critique that traces ontological concepts back to their ontic roots. But Destruktion is not a mere addendum to fundamental ontology; the two tasks are meant to counterbalance one another and thereby prevent the collapse of the ontological difference between being and beings. Indeed, Heidegger proposes to apply Destruktion to the results of his own fundamental ontology. He hopes to thereby achieve a transformation of the philosophical attitude that underpins the metaphysical tradition.

Development of an Ontological Cost Estimating Knowledge Framework for EPC Projects

This research standardizes a knowledge structure for estimation in the construction field by creating a method to enhance cost management efficiency of construction projects while meeting the need for reusability of accumulated construction information. The construction knowledge structure was developed to execute the project cost estimation with an ontological concept. The knowledge framework was defined and relevant examples were addressed to explain the structure. The detailed estimation process and methodology for using standard unit price information was also developed to strengthen cost information interoperability by utilizing standard classification systems, such as MasterFormat, UniFormat, UniClass, and ISO 12006. This concept may be proposed as a method of connecting construction information based on a standard cost classification system in order to improve estimation efficiency by increasing the connectivity of cost information. Ontology can be a powerful tool when used in conjunction with interoperability to manage the massive volume of construction information for cost management. This methodology can expand to integrated management in cost and time to derive additional classes for work breakdown structure (WBS). Thus, ontology may improve the efficiency of cost estimation and systematization by reusing construction information. As a further step, the interoperability method will enhance overall construction project management.

Comparative study using inverse ontology cogency and alternatives for concept recognition in the annotated National Library of Medicine database

This paper introduces inverse ontology cogency, a concept recognition process and distance function that is biologically-inspired and competitive with alternative methods. The paper introduces inverse ontology cogency as a new alternative method. It is a novel distance measure used in selecting the optimum mapping between ontology-specified concepts and phrases in free-form text. We also apply a multi-layer perceptron and text processing method for named entity recognition as an alternative to recurrent neural network methods. Automated named entity recognition, or concept recognition, is a common task in natural language processing. Similarities between confabulation theory and existing language models are discussed. This paper provides comparisons to MetaMap from the National Library of Medicine (NLM), a popular tool used in medicine to map free-form text to concepts in a medical ontology. The NLM provides a manually annotated database from the medical literature with concepts labeled, a unique, valuable source of ground truth, permitting comparison with MetaMap performance. Comparisons for different feature set combinations are made to demonstrate the effectiveness of inverse ontology cogency for entity recognition. Results indicate that using both inverse ontology cogency and corpora cogency improved concept recognition precision 20% over the best published MetaMap results. This demonstrates a new, effective approach for identifying medical concepts in text. This is the first time cogency has been explicitly invoked for reasoning with ontologies, and the first time it has been used on medical literature where high-quality ground truth is available for quality assessment.

The Elephant in the Handaxe: Lower Palaeolithic Ontologies and Representations

Indigenous hunter-gatherers view the world differently than do WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) societies. They depend—as in prehistoric times—on intimate relationships with elements such as animals, plants and stones for their successful adaptation and prosperity. The desire to maintain the perceived world-order and ensure the continued availability of whatever is necessary for human existence and well-being thus compelled equal efforts to please these other-than-human counterparts. Relationships of consumption and appreciation characterized human nature as early as the Lower Palaeolithic; the archaeological record reflects such ontological and cosmological conceptions to some extent. Central to my argument are elephants and handaxes, the two pre-eminent Lower Palaeolithic hallmarks of the Old World. I argue that proboscideans had a dual dietary and cosmological significance for early humans during Lower Paleolithic times. The persistent production and use of the ultimate megaherbivore processing tool, the handaxe, coupled with the conspicuous presence of handaxes made of elephant bones, serve as silent testimony for the elephant–handaxe ontological nexus. I will suggest that material culture is a product of people's relationships with the world. Early humans thus tailored their tool kits to the consumption and appreciation of specific animal taxa: in our case, the elephant in the handaxe.

Physics education students’ understanding of the concept of epistemology, ontology, and axiology

One of the studies in the physics education curriculum at the undergraduate level is the philosophy of science (POS). This study aims to analyse the university students’ understanding of the concept of epistemology, ontology, and axiology. As the situation of COVID-19 pandemic, an online survey design was utilised in this research. The participants included 89 students who were majoring in Physics Education at a public university in Surabaya Indonesia. In the duration of the Spring Semester 2020, the research was conducted by giving an online test containing statements with a value range of one to ten and a questionnaire with one to five Likert scale. The data obtained were then analysed using quantitative descriptive analysis techniques and an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to achieve the results of the students’ perception of the philosophy of science. The findings indicated it was about 22% of the total participants had a lack of understanding of epistemological studies. Meanwhile, a total of 14.3% of them had a lack of understanding of the concept of ontology. The best result was the understanding of the concept of axiology, the physics education students achieved 91.2% in a good level. Turning to the result of EFA, it stated all items developed to measure the factor behind the structure scale with loading factor more than 0.4 with the overall reliability of more than .80. These findings provide an additional treasure of previous knowledge that rarely explores the concept of epistemology, ontology, and axiology in a specific manner.

André Bazin's Eternal Returns: An Ontological Revision

The recent publication of André Bazin's Écrits complets (2018), an enormous two-volume edition of 3000 pages which increases ten-fold Bazin's available corpus, provides opportunities for renewed reflection on, and possibly for substantial revisions of, this key figure in film theory. On the basis of several essays, I propose a drastic rereading of Bazin's most explicitly philosophical notion of “ontology.” This all too familiar notion, long settled into a rather dust-laden couple (“Bazin and ontology”) nonetheless retains its fascination. Rather than attempting to provide a systematic reworking of this couple along well established lines, particularly those defined by realism and indexicality, this article proposes to shift the notion of ontology in Bazin from its determination as actual existence toward a more radical concept of ontology based on the notion of mimesis, particularly as articulated, in a Heideggerian mode, by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. This more properly ontological concept, also paradoxically and radically improper, is shown to be at work already in Bazin's texts, and it allows us to see that far from simplistically naturalizing photographic technology, Bazin does the contrary: he technicizes nature. If Bazin says that the photograph is a flower or a snowflake, he also implies that, like photographs, these are likewise a kind of technical artifact, an auto-mimetic reproduction of nature. Bazin likewise refers to film as a kind of skin falling away from the body of History, an accumulating pellicule in which nature and history disturbingly merge. This shifted perspective on Bazin's thinking is extended further in reference to Georges Didi-Huberman on the highly mimetic creatures known as phasmids, insects that mimic their environement. I extend this into the dynamic notion of eternal return, an implicit dimension of Bazin's thinking, clarified here in reference to Giorgio Agamben and the “immemorial image” which, like Bazin's “Death Every Afternoon,” presents an eminently repeatable deathly image, an animated corpse-world that can be likened to hell.

Kraft (Force)

The lexeme Kraft (force) is a foundational concept for Goethe that expresses the dynamism essential to his thought. Its tendency to move between operations of particularity and generality, polarity and intensification, differentiation and dedifferentiation, potentiality and actuality, norm and deviation, rationality and irrationality, and cognition and creativity together lend it a characteristic mobility, multiplicity, and diffusion. The discursive tensions and blendings of the concept during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—which extend between the obscure aesthetic construction of force in Karl Philipp Moritz and Johann Gottfried Herder and its scientific construction in Kant and Newton as the condition of possibility of knowledge—also manifest themselves in Goethe’s concept. As a grounding and ungrounding at one and the same time, Kraft thus serves as a material condition for the genesis of knowledge, on the one hand, and a metaphysical index of something absolutely unconditioned (das Unbedingte), on the other. When Goethe conceptualizes force as unconditioned, rather than as a condition of this or that individual being, he configures it in a number of ways. These include force as movement in processes of transformation and becoming, as potential, as a capacity for trans-discursive drift or blending, and as a non-discursive resistance to integration into normative, cognitive, and representational modes of thought. Certain scenes in Goethe's literary works—including most prominently, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809; The Elective Affinities), Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1821/29; Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years), Pandora (1807/08), and Faust(1808/32)—can be read as thought experiments that offer ontological conceptions of force in order to explore its informing oppositions of movement and metamorphosis, potentiality and actuality, as well as trans-discursivity and non-discursivity.

A novel approach for learning ontology from relational database: from the construction to the evaluation

The aim of converting relational database into Ontology is to provide applications that are based on the semantic representation of the data. Whereas, representing the data using ontologies has shown to be a useful mechanism for managing and exchanging data. This is the reason why bridging the gap between relational databases and ontologies has attracted the interest of the ontology community from early years, and it is commonly referred to as the database-to-ontology mapping problem. In this paper, we: (1) propose a new life cycle for ontology learning from RDBs based on the software engineering requirements; (2) describe a new method for building ontology from Relational database based on the predefined life cycle; (3) add three new semantics that can be extracted from RDB; (4) we suggest an evaluation process based on two categories of metrics: (i) conceptual ontology (TBox) evaluation metrics; (ii) factual ontology (ABox) evaluation metrics.

Semantic-based topic representation using frequent semantic patterns

Topic modeling discovers the hidden topics in a document collection. Most of the existing topic models focus only on word usage and generate the topics based on the word frequency and co-occurrence without considering the meaning of the text. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to generate a semantic pattern-based topic representation based on the meaning of the text to represent the topics in a document collection. The proposed approach considers both the semantics and co-occurrence of words to generate a set of frequent semantic patterns to represent each topic. The semantics are captured by matching the words in each topic with concepts in the Probase ontology. A set of frequent semantic patterns in each topic is generated based on the co-occurrence of the matched words to represent the topic. Hence, our approach differs from traditional topic models because of the meaningful frequent semantic patterns generated based on the ontology. The proposed topic representation was evaluated in terms of topic quality and information filtering performance against a set of state-of-the-art systems. Perplexity, coherence, and topic word distribution were examined in the topic quality evaluation. The generated frequent semantic patterns were used as features for the information filtering evaluation. Our topic representation outperformed in all the evaluations.

PhenoTagger: a hybrid method for phenotype concept recognition using human phenotype ontology.

Automatic phenotype concept recognition from unstructured text remains a challenging task in biomedical text mining research. Previous works that address the task typically use dictionary-based matching methods, which can achieve high precision but suffer from lower recall. Recently, machine learning-based methods have been proposed to identify biomedical concepts, which can recognize more unseen concept synonyms by automatic feature learning. However, most methods require large corpora of manually annotated data for model training, which is difficult to obtain due to the high cost of human annotation. In this article, we propose PhenoTagger, a hybrid method that combines both dictionary and machine learning-based methods to recognize Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) concepts in unstructured biomedical text. We first use all concepts and synonyms in HPO to construct a dictionary, which is then used to automatically build a distantly supervised training dataset for machine learning. Next, a cutting-edge deep learning model is trained to classify each candidate phrase (n-gram from input sentence) into a corresponding concept label. Finally, the dictionary and machine learning-based prediction results are combined for improved performance. Our method is validated with two HPO corpora, and the results show that PhenoTagger compares favorably to previous methods. In addition, to demonstrate the generalizability of our method, we retrained PhenoTagger using the disease ontology MEDIC for disease concept recognition to investigate the effect of training on different ontologies. Experimental results on the NCBI disease corpus show that PhenoTagger without requiring manually annotated training data achieves competitive performance as compared with state-of-the-art supervised methods. The source code, API information and data for PhenoTagger are freely available at https://github.com/ncbi-nlp/PhenoTagger. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Sujeto, subjetivación y ontología de nosotros mismos

El objetivo de este trabajo es dar cuenta de los conceptos de sujeto, subjetivación y ontología histórica de nosotros mismos. Estas categorías son esenciales en las pesquisas de Foucault de los años 80-84. De igual manera, desde estos conceptos, Foucault pudo pensar al sujeto de forma alterna al modo como este fue configurado en Occidente. En efecto, en sus intensas búsquedas encuentra en la tradición moderna, Baudelaire y Kant, pistas para considerar al sujeto no como un dato estático, sino como alguien que se gestiona a través de procesos históricos que lo van delineando y que lo habilitan en la empresa de construirse, de elaborarse a sí mismo, esto es, mediante procesos de subjetivación. Finalmente, la tradición antigua, es decir, la tradición greco-latina, le ofrece elementos teóricos sustanciales para reflexionar sobre las condiciones en las que se pueden configurar modos de vida, estilos de existencia que operen como ejes de resistencia a las formas que se nos han impuesto.

Between Dualism and Immanentism Sacramental Ontology and History

How to deal with religious ideas in religious history (and in history in general) has recently become a matter of discussion. In particular, a number of authors have framed their work around the concept of ‘sacramental ontology,’ that is, a unified vision of reality in which the secular and the religious come together, although maintaining their distinction. The authors’ choices have been criticized by their fellow colleagues as a form of apologetics and a return to integralism. The aim of this article is to provide a proper context in which to locate the phenomenon of sacramental ontology. I suggest considering (1) the generation of the concept of sacramental ontology as part of the internal dialectic of the Christian intellectual world, not as a reaction to the secular; and (2) the adoption of the concept as a protection against ontological nihilism, not as an attack on scientific knowledge.

Reification as an ontological concept

In this paper, I outline the ways that reification as a pathology of what I call “cybernetic society” shapes the fundamental structures of the self and our shared social reality. Whereas the classical theory of reification was a diagnostic attempt to understand the failure of class consciousness, I believe we must push this thesis further to show how it is fundamentally an ontological and not a merely cognitive or epistemic concern. By this I mean that it is a pathology of consciousness as well as social praxis and, as such, infects the ontological substrates of social reality. In effect, reification is a collective rather than merely subjective phenomenon. I explore this dialectic between our subjective and social dimensions of being to show how reification actively shapes both self and world. I end with a discussion of how this theory of reification as an ontological concept can be used to overcome it via what I term “ontological coherence,” or the capacity of the self to refect dialectically on the shapes of sociality that one inhabits, opening it up to evaluative refection and critique.

Thermodynamics of the Technosphere. Rethinking Temporality and Technicity in the Age of Planetary Emergency with Heidegger and Stiegler

This article critically reflects on Stiegler’s re-interpretation of Heidegger’s views on the relationships between existential temporality, the understanding of being and technology within the context of the latter’s notion of enframing, reconceptualized as an explicitly planetary phenomenon: the technosphere. Stiegler replaces Heidegger’s ontological conception with an organological one, arguing that the latter fails to understand these phenomena from the crucial perspective of thermodynamics, i.e., of the question of entropy and negentropy, which has never been addressed by Heidegger. What I particularly aim to show is that Stiegler’s organological re-intepretation of enframing as the technosphere and of existential temporality in terms of ‘quasi-causality’ (per Deleuze) may profit from being put in the broader, geothermodynamic context of Earth System Science, and considered from the perspective of Schneider & Sagan’s ‘gradient theory’, as being driven by what may be called the planetary ‘thermodynamic imperative’ with Jeffrey Wicken.